Do you want to save time and money in 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 contributes to learning success.
User Generated ... – WHAT?
The term User Generated Content – abbreviated: UGC – describes a relatively simple principle: If you translate the words into German, it explains itself almost by itself – The user-generated content. Originally, UGC is a term from advertising and indicates 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 consequently convey the knowledge better. Try it for yourself and let your employees create their own learning content! It doesn’t matter how and to what extent they produce content – only the learning effect for all involved counts.
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 offers a win-win situation for all involved!
Benefits for you:
You save a lot of time in creating learning content when you delegate this task to your employees. This way, you have more time for other important tasks.
You save money for your company. When qualified employees create the content, you neither have to acquire the knowledge yourself nor engage an external trainer or coach.
The learning process is more effective when your employees are involved in the creation process of learning content – especially when it comes to subject-specific or company-specific knowledge.
Benefits for your employees:
Understanding increases when learning content is created by oneself. Additionally, it is easier to convey to others.
Your employees internalize the content even more intensively by writing down processes.
Your employees feel better integrated into the company and sense greater responsibility in the learning process. This increases motivation to participate and learn!
Connection increases the learning effect
The last advantage is particularly important: When your employees produce content themselves, they feel more connected to your company – this enhances motivation and a sense of community.
In this created community, your colleagues can not only upload content in the form of learning materials themselves – they can also help each other through their own content. UGC could thus also 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 faster and more purposefully from A to B. This further accelerates the transfer of knowledge.
How employees create content [Study]
A recent Harvard Business Publishing study investigated how employees learn in the context of their professional development. It turns out that colleagues exchange their knowledge and further educate each other. Thus, employees generate learning content for themselves and other colleagues:
Own illustration: Harvard Business Publishing study results 2019
The illustration shows that currently only a few pieces of learning content are created by employees for internal training. However, many companies are missing out on a lot of learning potential that you should definitely utilize! In addition to messengers for quick questions, screencasts and videos are particularly helpful formats for conveying learning content or workflows to other employees quickly and easily – because let’s 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 important to facilitate this exchange of content as easily and pleasantly as possible. How about an app where your employees can upload their own content for training with minimal effort and make it accessible to other colleagues?
Targeted support for content creation by your employees
Are your employees already creating learning content and exchanging it among themselves? Then support them in content creation by suggesting suitable formats. In particular, videos are well suited for providing learning content to other individuals. They are easy to produce and technically as well as cognitively accessible for the learners.
With these three tips, it will be even easier for you in the future to support your employees in producing valuable learning content:
Make it easy for your employees to produce videos
We provide you with a first support tool with our free Video Cheat Sheet. This can be shared with your colleagues, alleviating their uncertainty in content creation.Involve employees who are enthusiastic about media explicitly
Do you have employees on your team who already possess a flair 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.Then excite all employees by showing how easy it is
Do you want to convince all employees of videos as a learning tool? Then give them a brief introduction on how they can shoot videos with their smartphones. We have also prepared learning material 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 way, you too will take a step towards more learning success through User Generated Content!
