L&Ds approach to content curation in 2020

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Libby Cross, Senior Marketing Executive

The learning and development industry is awash with content. From blogs and articles to podcasts and videos, there’s something for everyone; for every journey, every learning outcome.

When the L&D community moved away from compulsory training with tick-box exercises and end-of-module tests, content in any form became the driving force of any successful organizational learning strategy.

Mostly, the content available to us is great, truly engaging and relevant to our needs. However, there are some of a more questionable standard floating about the web too.

Finding the right content

For years, most believed that access to a wealth of content was the best approach an organization could take to fulfil their learners’ needs. Yet, in a typical learning situation, a learner can only process one resource at a single time.

According to findings in the ‘High-impact Learning Organization’ study by Josh Bersin for Deloitte in 2018, the problem our learners were encountering wasn’t to do with a lack of content. In fact, the issue is that there is too much content, making it a task itself to sift through the bad to get to the valuable.

Soon, it became apparent that when given nothing but choice, the learner disengages, growing confused and unsure about the content that is right for their specific learning needs.

The role of the content curator 

In response, the role of the content curator within an L&D department soared in popularity. The purpose of the content curator is to aggregate, organize, and share relevant content with the relevant person via the most appropriate channel.

This isn’t a case of scouring the web to find articles concerning the latest trends and buzz words and loading them into an LMS or LXP. It is far more complex than that.

The content curator must take into consideration the industry they’re working for, the array of roles they’re researching for, and the skills each individual might need to succeed and excel in their specific role. Not to mention, the vast range of ages and levels of technical skills apparent in most modern organizations will have an effect on the way in which information is disseminated.

But unfortunately for some, hiring for a content curator as a full-time position just isn’t within their reach. And so, they find themselves almost back to square one.

What’s the solution?

We’ve always been big advocates for organizations to adopt more ‘curation’ in their approach to knowledge, learning, and development. Following the innovation of the LXP last year, the opportunity for learning providers to automate content curation is now more feasible than ever.

Bridging the gap between learners and content, Curation as a Service (CaaS) is an automated process that will deliver timely, up-to-date, and expert information, as curated by humans, directly to an organization’s learning platform, typically an LXP.

What are the benefits? 

Content is always from a reliable source – every piece is reviewed by a real person before it’s loaded onto any platform. Curators sift through content available from the experts and thought leaders in your industry to highlight the best learning content for your organization.

Content is sourced to suit your learners – a successful approach to content curation is one that achieves a mix of video, audio, infographics, and written resources to suit all kinds of learners and their environments.

Content is always up-to-date – a feed of fresh and relevant content is updated on a regular basis with CaaS, so you know the content available to your learners is always the most appropriate at their time of need.

The aim of CaaS is to help struggling organizations fill in the missing pieces in their content libraries that cannot be created or bought off-the-shelf and is a much more cost-effective solution for those organizations that cannot hire a content curator or even creator.

If you’d like to learn more about Curation as a Service contact [email protected] or fill in the form below.