In today’s environment of leaner teams and accelerated change, organizations must deliver meaningful learning experiences without adding headcount. Enter the three-tiered content evolution model—Off-the-Shelf, Customized, and Custom—which enables L&D leaders to scale employee development while aligning with organizational goals. In this blog, we explore why evolving your content strategy matters and how a “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach helps companies grow into more strategic and personalized training at the right pace.

Table of Contents

Why Does Your Content Strategy Need to Evolve

The 3 Powerful Content Types Explained

Why Does This Model Work

Implementing the Model into Your Organization

The Business Impact of Adoption

Why Does Your Content Strategy Need to Evolve?

The challenges facing L&D today are constantly shifting, requiring a level of agility like never before. But the responsibility for keeping up with these changes doesn’t fall solely on the shoulders of the L&D team. With leaner resources, increasing business demands, rapid skill evolution, and hybrid workforces, one-size-fits-all training often falls short. 

To keep pace, training content must be flexible and adaptable to the needs of various industries and work environments. With the right learning partner, transitioning from transactional content delivery to transformative learning experiences has never been easier—or more necessary. 

The 3 Powerful Content Types Explained

What does it mean to provide transformative learning experiences? It means delivering content that supports both soft and technical skill development, so that it can meet learners where they are on their development journey while also meeting the unique needs of the organization. 

At BizLibrary, we recommend partnering with a provider that offers three distinct content types: 

1. Off-the-Shelf Content: Crawl 

This is your launchpad. Off-the-shelf content helps administrators cover foundational topics like compliance, soft skills, and leadership with minimal effort.  

During the vetting process, look for content that is:   

• Created by subject-matter experts 

• Scalable and easy to deploy (especially when paired with an integrated LMS) 

• Regularly updated and designed for high engagement 

Having content that checks these boxes enables organizations to cover broad foundational needs with minimal effort.  

Consider checking out Martin Engineering’s success story to see how they built their highly successful emerging leaders program using BizLMS and BizLibrary’s expansive content library.     

2. Customized Content: Walk 

Customized content allows you to take off-the-shelf materials and personalize them to reflect your organization’s voice and culture. This can include: 

• Pre-recorded intros from leadership 

• Downloadable PDFs and reference materials 

• Custom interactions and branding 

This step increases employee engagement, knowledge retention, and cultural alignment. 

Check out Challenge Unlimited’s success story story to see how they blended customized and off-the-shelf content to create a rich onboarding experience. 

3. Custom Content: Run 

This is where your L&D strategy becomes a differentiator. Custom content is built from the ground up—often using AI-powered tools—and is designed to address specific business needs or proprietary processes. It’s ideal for: 

• Unique workflows 

• Industry-specific scenarios 

• Company values and strategic initiatives 

For instance, organizations can transform their core values into a custom training module used in performance reviews or onboarding—building stronger cultural alignment and encouraging true behavior change. 

Why Does This Model Work?

The Crawl, Walk, Run model simplifies content planning and supports scalable growth. Whether you’re just starting out or refining an existing L&D program, this framework can meet you where you are.

Here are four key reasons why this model works:

• Scalable Progression: You don’t have to start at 100%. Grow content maturity over time. 

• Cost & Time Efficiency: Reserve high-effort content development for high-impact topics. 

• Personalization Without Overload: Balance effort and relevance with strategic customization. 

• AI Acceleration: Custom content is now within reach thanks to AI-driven tools that cut time and costs. 

Implementing the Model in Your Organization

Wondering how you can take this model and implement it in your organization? We’ve rounded up some questions to consider when evaluating the current and future state of your content mix.  

1. Where are we seeing low engagement? 

2. Which skills matter most to our strategy? 

3. What’s currently taking too long to produce internally? 

Now that you’ve got the full picture, identify areas where quick deployment can free up your team, such as monthly soft skill topics. Instead of filming in-house, build playlists of high-quality, ready-made videos. 

Next, look at most-used modules and think about possible customization options that could increase relevance and retention of the topic. A great place to look first is compliance and safety lessons, given their required, and highly important, nature.  

Lastly, invest in custom content where differentiation or transformation is required. Ask your LMS provider if they offer an AI-powered custom content creation feature, like for example BizLibrary’s BizCreate, which can help churn out custom content quickly.  

The Business Impact of Adoption

Once you implement the model into your L&D strategy, you’ll begin to see many benefits, not only for your department, but for the overall business too. These include:  

Final Thoughts

This model is more than content—it’s a roadmap to operationalizing learning at scale. When learning feels relevant, personal, and aligned to the business, it becomes an engine for performance. 

Your people are your advantage. The right content unlocks their potential.