L&D Industry Standards

Industry Standards?

If you’re looking for ‘standards’ in this profession, you’re on a long journey there. There is no standards body for learning, there’s not even a professional association with national, let alone global reach, that has the mandate, magnitude or influence to define ‘standards’. There are a few defacto standards (SCORM/AICC) and many good practices – but no codified set of international and widely accepted/adopted ‘standards’.

However, reading on in your request, I see that what you are looking for is not ‘standards’ but a cost / time / resource estimate for various types of learning content development. The answers to those questions will vary widely by solution type, vendor, delivery method, and other factors such as whether the learning needs to be localised, translated, deployed through mobile and desktop devices, what mix of content is used in development (video, audio, simulation, animation, static graphics, navigation, glossary, pop-ups, flash), whether the client needs resources with security clearance, whether they must be landed resources on client site, on vendor site, or whether near-shore or global resourcing is an option, and so on…

Beware of any response that equates to ‘It takes n days and costs x amount to develop y’. There are far too many unspoken assumptions and variables implied in any such response.

For example, let’s start with the industry standard defintions of ‘simple’ and ‘eLearning’?

These are nebulous terms, loaded with assumption, subjective values, and viewed from potentially quite different perspectives by the author and the reader. One client I spoke to this week was adamant that sending a PDF quick reference guide to their employees was an example of ‘eLearning’ – yikes!

Another often quoted requirement is ‘wow factor’. Where is ‘wow’ defined? It’s one of those requirements that no client can clearly articulate in objective terms, and will mean wildly different things from one client stakeholder to the next – yet most every client wants (and expects) wow!

In order to grapple with all this uncertaintly, IBM has defined precisely what it will deliver for certain prescribed levels of learning content interaction. We provide examples of content at each level, which allows the client to see exactly what we mean by for example ‘simple eLearning’.

— Paul D Jagger PgDMS CITP FBCS twitter, skype and linkedin: pauldjagger

2 Responses

spectrain says:

July 13, 2012 at 7:41 am

L&D Industry Standards

Hi, there is some info on L&D benchmarks that might be useful below:

http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-resources/factsheets/costing-benchmarking-learning-development.aspx
User deleted says:

July 13, 2012 at 8:21 am

Industry Standards?

If you’re looking for ‘standards’ in this profession, you’re on a long journey there. There is no standards body for learning, there’s not even a professional association with national, let alone global reach, that has the mandate, magnitude or influence to define ‘standards’. There are a few defacto standards (SCORM/AICC) and many good practices – but no codified set of international and widely accepted/adopted ‘standards’.

However, reading on in your request, I see that what you are looking for is not ‘standards’ but a cost / time / resource estimate for various types of learning content development. The answers to those questions will vary widely by solution type, vendor, delivery method, and other factors such as whether the learning needs to be localised, translated, deployed through mobile and desktop devices, what mix of content is used in development (video, audio, simulation, animation, static graphics, navigation, glossary, pop-ups, flash), whether the client needs resources with security clearance, whether they must be landed resources on client site, on vendor site, or whether near-shore or global resourcing is an option, and so on…

Beware of any response that equates to ‘It takes n days and costs x amount to develop y’. There are far too many unspoken assumptions and variables implied in any such response.

For example, let’s start with the industry standard defintions of ‘simple’ and ‘eLearning’?

These are nebulous terms, loaded with assumption, subjective values, and viewed from potentially quite different perspectives by the author and the reader. One client I spoke to this week was adamant that sending a PDF quick reference guide to their employees was an example of ‘eLearning’ – yikes!

Another often quoted requirement is ‘wow factor’. Where is ‘wow’ defined? It’s one of those requirements that no client can clearly articulate in objective terms, and will mean wildly different things from one client stakeholder to the next – yet most every client wants (and expects) wow!

In order to grapple with all this uncertaintly, IBM has defined precisely what it will deliver for certain prescribed levels of learning content interaction. We provide examples of content at each level, which allows the client to see exactly what we mean by for example ‘simple eLearning’.

— Paul D Jagger PgDMS CITP FBCS twitter, skype and linkedin: pauldjagger