Develop Online Courses at Scale With A Flexible Workforce
A flexible workforce is a strategy for hiring based on needs.
In a perfect world, your team would easily handle the variable workload of course development. You would have the right person for each aspect of the project. Your highly skilled team would work quickly to meet ambitious production goals. Together you’d craft an exceptional online course that is exactly what your students need.
The reality is less idyllic. In the real world, you have a small team with an impressive, but not unlimited skillset. You’re constrained by gaps in specialized skills, but even more so by time. There simply aren’t enough people or enough hours to get everything done and outperform other courses. You could just accept this reality, or you could find another way. A flexible workforce can help you find the right people at the right time to develop online courses you can be proud of.
What is a flexible workforce and how can it support course development?
A flexible workforce is a strategy for hiring based on needs. Staffing agencies help businesses hire a mix of full-time and part-time employees, temp-to-permanent workers, contractors, and consultants. Ultimately, it saves organizations money, while enabling them to do more, and improve products and services.
Businesses have leveraged flexible workforces to operate and compete more successfully for decades. They bring in consultants and others with specialized skills to help improve products and services, build new core competencies, and innovate. Flexible workforces enable them to quickly and cost-effectively scale up or down based on demand.
Consider the temp worker hiring frenzy that helps retailers and shipping companies continue to serve their customers during the holiday rush. A similar strategy could meet your talent needs when you’re developing a new program or getting courses ready pre-term.
We are at a unique point in history. Even as the world has been thrust into digital learning, technological advancements continue to accelerate the pace of change across industries and subject areas.
Ultimately learning, particularly continuous learning, will be more important than ever for people at all stages of life and career. It also means that the tools we use to design and develop learning will continue to change as industries advance. To compete in an increasingly connected and competitive world, we can borrow the flexible hiring strategies that have worked in the business.
When should you use a flexible workforce?
Keeping a full learning and development team on staff is expensive. When everyone is working at full capacity to develop your next course or program, that expense makes sense. Yet, some of these experts, particularly highly specialized talent, may only be needed to contribute at certain points in the design and development process. In between, they’re not being fully utilized, but you still have to pay them and fund their benefits. These demand slumps cost you money.
At other points, particularly, before the course start, you may need extra professionals, such as learning technologists to support final course production and QA. Other projects may require skills that fall just outside your in-house team’s area of expertise. They could learn new skills, but that takes time, and they won’t have the depth of knowledge that a true expert could bring. Hiring a true expert as a traditional employee is a big commitment, and you may not need their expertise again once this project is complete.
Fortunately, the talent pool for flexible workforces is probably larger than you think. Freelancers comprise about 35% of the U.S. workforce. Many of these professionals have built deep expertise in education, edtech, and course development. You can bring in that skill and knowledge exactly when you need it. That’s when a flexible workforce is most valuable.
What are the Benefits of a Flexible Workforce?
Cost savings are just a portion of the benefits a flexible workforce can offer. This staffing solution allows you to:
- Get more done: When there’s a lot to do, increase the number of qualified individuals on your team, and meet your project goals.
- Respond to natural ebbs in demand: Avoid paying for services you don’t need and only call in skilled individuals when their part of the project is at hand.
- Access more innovation: Bringing in new, part-time, temporary workers exposes your team to new ideas and fresh ways of thinking.
- Engage with specialists: Hire the perfect person for the project every time. Specialists, subject matter experts, and skilled workers bring the exact skill set you need when you need it.
How to Get the Flexible Workforce You Need
Of course, finding the flexible workers you need, when you need them, isn’t always easy. That’s when expert guidance from a staffing agency like Teamed comes in handy. We are continuously vetting and building a network of talent for the learning industry. When you have a need, we help you find the perfect temporary team member or employee.
From finding talent worth interviewing to acting as the employer of record, we ease the process of finding, onboarding, and offboarding new team members. Craft your next course in a more perfect world. Let us help you build the flexible workforce team you need.
