You want to save time and money on the training of your employees – while also increasing the learning effect? Then let your employees create the learning content themselves! In this article, you will learn how user-generated content can contribute to your learning success.
User Generated … – WHAT?
The term user-generated content – or UGC for short – is based on a relatively simple principle: when you translate the words into English, it explains itself almost automatically – The user-generated content. Originally, UGC is a term from advertising that states that content created by users is the best advertisement for a product.
From this, you can derive a simple learning concept: those who produce learning content themselves also learn more about the product or topic – and can subsequently convey that knowledge more effectively. Try it out for yourself and let your employees create their own learning content! It doesn't matter how and to what extent they produce content – what counts is solely the learning effect for all parties involved.
User generated content: Let your employees create content for their training themselves!
Why employees should create content themselves
Both employees and HR personnel benefit from self-created content – UGC thus offers a win-win situation for all parties involved!
Advantages for you:
You save a lot of time in creating learning content when you delegate this task to your employees. This gives you more time for other important tasks.
You save money for your company. If qualified employees create the content, you do not have to acquire the knowledge yourself or hire an external trainer or coach.
The learning process is more effective when your employees are actively involved in the creation process for learning content – especially when it comes to specialized or company-specific knowledge.
Advantages for your employees:
Their own understanding increases when learning content has been created by themselves. Moreover, it is easier to convey to others.
Your employees internalize the content even more intensely by writing down processes themselves.
Your employees feel better integrated into the company and sense greater responsibility in the learning process. This increases motivation to participate and learn!
Connectedness increases the learning effect
The last advantage is particularly important: When your employees produce content themselves, they feel more connected to your company – this boosts motivation and a sense of community.
In this created community, your colleagues can not only upload content in the form of learning materials – they can also help each other with their own content. UGC could thus consist of a response to a specific question, a helpful tip, or the general exchange regarding the provided learning content.
Through direct exchange among colleagues, information flows even faster and more purposefully from A to B. This additionally accelerates the transfer of knowledge.
How employees create content [Study]
A recent Harvard Business Publishing study has investigated how workers learn in the context of their professional development. It was found that colleagues exchange knowledge with each other and engage in further education. This way, employees generate learning content for themselves and other colleagues:
Own representation: Harvard Business Publishing study results 2019
The representation shows that currently only a few learning contents are created by employees for internal training. Many companies, however, miss out on a lot of learning potential, which you should definitely take advantage of! In addition to messengers for quick questions, especially screencasts and videos are helpful formats to quickly and easily convey learning content or workflows to other employees – because, to be honest: who likes to read lengthy texts?
Prerequisite: A suitable platform for user-generated content
If employees are to create content themselves, especially in the form of videos, the question arises: where to put the content? An important step is the provision of a suitable platform. Because: it is essential to make this exchange of content as easy and pleasant as possible. How about an app where your employees can upload their own content for training without much effort and make it accessible to other colleagues?
Your admin demo
Test the blink.it platform for free with a non-binding demo. High data security and the availability of learning content on all devices make blink.it a suitable tool for your company!
Purposefully support content creation by your employees
Are your employees already creating learning content and sharing it among themselves? Then support them in content creation by suggesting suitable formats. In particular, videos are well suited to provide learning content for other individuals. They are easy to produce and concurrently technically and cognitively accessible for learners.
With these three tips, it will be even easier for you in the future to support your employees in the production of valuable learning content:
Make it easy for your employees to produce videos
We provide you with an initial support with our free video cheat sheet. You can pass this on to your colleagues and thus alleviate their uncertainty in content creation.Involve employees who are passionate about media
Do you have employees on your team who already have an affinity for video production or are very open to it? Include them in your planning and let them set a good example. We provide you with 5 ideas for successful learning videos in companies that you can recommend to such employees.Subsequently inspire all employees by demonstrating how easy it is
Do you want to convince all employees of videos as a learning tool? Then give them a short introduction on how they can shoot videos with their smartphones. We also have learning materials for you!
Do you want to motivate your employees to create their own videos with their smartphones? Download our free guide on the topic “Shooting videos with your smartphone” and share this content with your employees. This will also help you take the step towards more learning success through user-generated content!
