We have years of experience designing and developing team leader and management levels courses for inhouse delivery, sometimes stand alone and sometimes as part of a qualification such as one from the ILM.
We're interested in assessing whether there is a market for packaging the course material and selling to perhaps new trainers moving into the freelance world and needing good material which they can adapt or rebadge. Material may also be useful to people interested in moving into qualfication based training or looking to use blended learrning.
I would really appreciate any feedback - what do you use at the moment, where would you look for resources and would you be interested in pre-written, flexible material?
thank you
Lesley Anderson
3 Responses
Materials for trainers
Hi Lesley
I think there is a market for this but it’s hard to break into! We know there are a lot of "free" training materials that are actually not very good and fairly generic and at the other extreme lots of glossy packaged material that is too expensive and not flexible enough to be tailored for a specific group. I have a membership site for trainers and HR practitioners delivering soft skills http://www.unimenta.com and we do offer materials for sale on the site – see here: http://www.unimenta.com/Default.aspx?pagename=Training-material-and-resources and what we do is try and offer very flexible packages – anything from one-off small workshop chunk to something longer and we also offer support with it. Trainers also want to see what they are buying first so you’ll need to offer lots of freebies. All our stuff is digital and can be customised.
We’ve also developed and are launching, this autumn, a postgraduate qualification in the delivery of soft skills – and experiential learning so your packages may also be something we can offer our programme participants to help them get started. http://www.unimenta.com/Default.aspx?pagename=Post-graduate-qualification
I’d be interested in talking to you about this further as your materials may well be of value to our members. Contact me on [email protected] if you would like to chat more.
Bite-size and Licence Free
I sell materials for a range of licence-free bite-size training sessions. The idea was that people don’t always need (or can take) whole days for training, AND a lot of businesses are trying to encourage their managers to take responsibility for developing their own teams.
Our materials are very detailed (not quite a script) and priced to go. Despite lots of businesses and trainers telling me it is a fantastic idea AND that the materials are great value for money, we don’t sell as many as we would like. I think this is partly due to trainers wanting to ‘own’ the material, and the fact that you often don’t know what you are buying until you’ve bought it. We offer a free sample (but this is hardly ever used), AND the option to but editable versions for a slightly higher price.
I suspect that larger businesses are reluctant to buy from a website that is percieved as a ‘small’ company too – which is one of the reasons we’ve partnered with Training Zone and sell through their shop as well as directly on our website. The other factor of course is pricing… We’ve gone in low (given the vast amount of free resources on the internet), but independent trainers appear reluctant to spend anything, whilst large businesses think that a low price mean that the materials can’t be any good, so I sometimes feel in a no-win situation!
Sites like The Complete Trainer used to sell ‘white-lable’ training materials, but they have closed down now, which I suppose tells a story in itself.
In short, I guess the answer to your question is Yes – there is a market, but its not a big as you think, and you will have to spend a lot of time marketing!
Louise Gelsthorpe
Power Hour – Bite-Size Licence Free Training Materials
Interested in feedback on selling workbooks and workshop materia
Hi Lesley,
I have materials on my web site mainly there as samples of work and to attract traffic, the materials that sell tend to be toolkits put up after specific courses, so if I run a HR Audit course I will make a toolkit available for purchase via the site for a limited time.
I also have material on Trainerbase and over the years it is the free material that has attracted most downloads.
I know several trainers who sell on Ebay, I suspect its a minefield and I wouldn’t know how to handle their returns policy, anyone could buy and return material having copied it completly diluting your intellectual property.
The Trainer Bubble site has quite a comprehensive range of material, from 1 hour bubbles to extensive end to end solutions, perhaps this will give you some ideas:http://www.trainerbubble.com/Products.aspx
Joy