Build the Course, Buy the Course, or Have It Written for You

Every course you assign comes from one of three places. You build it, with your own people writing from what they know. You buy it, as a finished course from a library or a course vendor. Or you have it written for you by a freelance designer, an agency or an AI employee working from your material. The U.S.

Bureau of Labor Statistics lists reviewing and selecting training materials from a variety of vendors among the duties of training and development managers. It also lists designing and creating manuals, online modules and course materials as core work for training specialists. So buying and building are both normal parts of the job. The useful question is which topic belongs on which path.

• Build: a manager or your most experienced employee writes the lesson, often as a document or a slide deck.
• Buy: you license a finished course on a general topic and assign it as it is.
• Have it written: someone outside your staff turns your own material into a course that you approve.

Sort the topics before you compare prices or tools. A generic topic is the same in any company of your type, such as workplace conduct or basic customer service. A company topic is about how you do things: your booking steps, your pricing rules, your quality check and the tools on your counter. Library courses are strong on generic topics and silent on company topics. No library knows your refund rule or the order in which you open the shop. When a new hire gets something wrong in the first month, check which group the mistake came from. That tells you where the missing course is.

• Generic: the same in any company like yours, and stable for years.
• Company: your steps, your products, your tools and your standards.
• Mixed: a general rule plus your own way of applying it, such as how your team calms an upset customer.

Price tags hide most of the cost, because the biggest line is usually time. Count it the same way for every path before you choose. For the hourly cost of a writer or trainer in your area, the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program publishes wage estimates by state and metro area. Use your own payroll for the time of your staff. Fill in these fields for one course, not for the whole program, and compare the totals.

• Expert hours: time your most experienced person spends explaining or writing, multiplied by their hourly cost.
• Writing cost: staff hours, a vendor license or a project fee, whichever applies.
• Review hours: the time the owner of the process spends reading and approving the draft.
• Update hours per year: how often the topic changes, multiplied by the hours each change takes.
• Exit cost: what you lose or must rebuild if you stop paying.

Use this table one topic at a time. Read each row that describes the topic and check which conditions hold in your company. The path whose conditions you can meet most easily is your starting point. Where two paths tie, pick the one that keeps updates in your own hands.

The first version is the easy part. A course starts to age the day a step, a product or a price changes, and someone has to notice. A course you built waits for the person who wrote it, and that person is busy. A bought course changes on the vendor's schedule and never learns your changes. A course written for you depends on how fast the writer can redraft from the new source. BLS counts updating training programs so they stay relevant as part of the training manager's job. Before you choose a path, name the person who will own each course after launch. If you cannot name one, the path does not matter yet.

Elvina is one way to take the third path for company topics. You add SOPs, checklists and recorded walk-throughs to Company Knowledge, which is available now, and a named person approves each source. Creation Studio drafts lessons, job aids, quizzes and avatar video lessons from those sources, and that drafting is available now. Nothing reaches staff until a person signs off, and that approval step is available now as well. Export to SCORM, xAPI or MP4 is available now if you run another system.

When a source changes, our team starts the redraft today, and a person approves the new version before it goes out. For now our team does the building with you on the platform, and Elvina takes on each step once it is confirmed. Elvina is not a course library, so for generic topics compare a ready-made course with the cost form above. It does not grant certifications or stand in for training a regulator requires.

A fictional tuxedo and suit rental shop dresses wedding parties and proms. It hires a fitter from time to time and extra counter staff before every prom season. The owner lists her training topics and sorts them with the table above.

• Workplace conduct and basic customer service are generic, so she buys a ready-made course for both.
• Measuring a customer and checking a returned suit for damage follow her own rules, and the return check changed when she added photos at the counter. Elvina drafts that lesson from her recorded walk-through, which is available now, and she approves it.
• The pressing station restock list is short and rarely changes, so the head fitter writes it herself.
• She names herself as owner of the measuring and return lesson and the head fitter as owner of the restock list.
• Some topics wait, because nobody can say yet what the standard should be.

Judge the choice per topic after a few months, using your own records rather than a vendor's claim. Track the same items for every path so the comparison is fair, and include review time in every total.

• Expert and owner hours spent per course, including review and corrections.
• Days from deciding on a course to the first person assigned to it.
• Courses that match the current version of their source, checked once a quarter.
• New hires who pass the course check, and mistakes at work that trace back to a topic.
• Assigned courses that people never opened, sorted by path.

Should we build or buy training content? Buy ready-made courses for topics that are the same in every company like yours. Build or order courses for your own procedures, products and tools. Decide topic by topic, count expert and review time as well as fees, and name the person who will update each course after launch.

• Is off-the-shelf training ever enough for a small business? For generic topics, it can be. Workplace conduct or general customer service rarely needs your own version. It is not enough for the steps that make your business different, because a library course cannot know your rules. Pair a bought course with a short company lesson where the two meet.
• Who owns a course that someone else writes for us? That depends on the contract, not on who paid. Ask in writing who owns the finished lessons, your source material and any stock media, and what you can export if you leave. This is not legal advice; for a binding answer, have a lawyer read the agreement.

Public sources, checked on the date shown.

• BLS lists reviewing and selecting training materials from vendors, and updating programs to keep them relevant, among training and development managers' duties. Source: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/training-and-development-managers.htm (checked 2026-10-02).
• BLS says training and development specialists design and create training manuals, online learning modules and course materials. Source: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/business-and-financial/training-and-development-specialists.htm (checked 2026-10-02).
• The BLS OEWS program publishes employment and wage estimates by occupation for the nation, each state and metropolitan areas. Source: https://www.bls.gov/oes/ (checked 2026-10-02).