Corporate MOOC’s

The use of Corporate MOOC’s will become more evident as businesses understand that this process can become a Revenue generation for them and possibly lower the cost of recruitment. 

All businesses are looking for new revenue streams and seeking cost reductions in implementing efficiencies. I see that Corporate MOOC’s will achieve both of these outcomes when the engagement occurs in pre-employment of a potential employer. This pre-engagement will take the shape of a course that is predominately about the  organisation and also the skills required within the job of the particular organisation. 

The Corporate MOOC could be a  free or a paid course and could be an ongoing course or a short duration course. These courses would attract potential employees who would undertake the course and learn first hand about the requirements of the job within the organisation. By providing a free course the organisation can promote their social responsibility by providing an equal opportunity to all applicants who are wishing to seek a job with an organisation. The paid section of the MOOC could be just attributed to the assessment or the assessment plus job promotion. That is, applicants could pay to have their assessments marked but also forwarded onto the recruiting process, thus short circuiting the traditional HR resume submissions.

These courses should have an assessment strategy that provides the applicant with the ability to see their ranking against the other potential employees. This would encourage (or discourage) the applicants to seek further learnings to enhance their assessment scores. Obviously, the assessment strategy would need to have an ongoing and ever changing format to prevent the “scamming” of the assessment. This can be achieved by utilising other platforms likehttp://Smarterer.com which  utilise an algorithm to rank according to levels of knowledge, speed of knowledge and currency of knowledge. It is this collaborative engagement between platforms that will help organisations find the most suitable applicant for the position on offer.

These Corporate MOOC’s will flood the recruitment scene until various MOOC’s start to become the “favourite” for both the employer and potential employee. This favourite MOOC will reflect best practice across a number of sectors in the industry. This means that possibly a Top Tier company will develop the MOOC and associated assessments and lower tiered companies in that same sector will accept the initial MOOC as reflecting best practice and will honour the assessment results for their own recruitment process. This would further reduce the cost of recruitment, but would mean surrendering the opportunity to create revenue, but as a small company there may not be the volume of potential employees to generate a significant revenue.

MOOC’s are an acceptable environment with Generation Z who were born with computers and are ever engaging with online platforms for a wider and wider segment of their lives. If it saves time and is open and fair then Generation Z will accept the engagement as part of the process. Many of these young people are now starting to question their post schooling education and are starting to see levels of irrelevance between what the higher education sector offers and what Corporations want from their potential employees.

Corporate MOOC’s will drive a new industry in capturing the corporate knowledge and packaging it into chunks of learning that can easily be accessed, be easily learnt, and be easily discarded. This new style of content creation and packaging will need to be delivered as “Disposable Learning”. This Disposable Learning takes on the characteristics of other disposable commodities where functionality is paramount with other attributes of low cost, minimal shelf life, ability to be created quickly and acceptance of disposability. This is at the other end of the educational spectrum of Degrees which are seen as an Investment for life.

But with all business transactions there is a simple calculation of ROI (Return on Investment) and the Corporate MOOC’s have this ROI in their favour for both the organisation and the potential employee. Corporate MOOC’s have a future because there is a profit to be made by all parties.