Our ID&e-LD Incubator is aimed at Capacity Development - not Product Development

Human Capital and Skills Development are crucial for driving effective business operations, successful project implementations, and overall organizational growth. In South Africa, the B-BBEE Scorecard incentivizes companies to invest in training and development for employees, local communities, and supply chains.

However, the rapid digital revolution, accelerated by the pandemic, has reshaped the educational landscape, with online learning becoming more personalized, flexible, and cost-effective.

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Despite its advantages, developing high-quality e-learning content is both time-intensive and expensive, requiring specialized teams with diverse skills. In 2010, studies showed that producing one hour of educational content could cost R190,000 on average, a figure that has surged to R361,000 by 2024. As a result, learning materials development is often seen as a cost center for businesses.

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However, with the e-learning market projected to reach $645 billion by 2030, and a 13% annual growth rate, organizations must rethink their approach.

By transforming Learning Development from a cost center into a profit center, businesses can seize the growing demand for digital and future skills—such as AI, cybersecurity, data analytics, and robotics—which are essential for emerging job markets.

Online learning offers an opportunity to expand capacity, lower costs, and improve quality, making it a vital tool for addressing the skills gap and ensuring sustainable growth across industries.

If you are an organisation that needs to convert your current face-to-face training offerings to an online format, or need to roll-out a large amount of learning projects, you will need additional highly-skilled capacity to execute these large-scale projects.

The Instructional Design and e-Learning Developer (ID-e-LD) Incubator proposes that we flip our thinking from a Product Development approach – to a Capacity Development approach, within which Product Development is also achieved, along with developing a Talent Pipeline that can continue to service your business into the future – not to mention the Return-on-Investment Benefits!

The ID&e-LD (Instructional Design & e-Learning Development) Incubator provides a mechanism to produce or adapt training material at scale - cheaper, better and faster, by switching our thinking to investing in People Development – rather than Product Development.

The incubator is perfect for organizations that:

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• Want to get into the e-Learning space but don’t have the resources or capacity.

• Have a lot of training courses that need to be created, customized, converted to

• e-learning or updated.

• Need to convert and realign their current training offerings to the new QCTO framework.

• Need to show they are contributing to local community development or supply chain growth.

• Want to take advantage of tax rebates and incentives for skills development and youth employment.

• High return on investment (ROI) by reducing costs through tax rebates, grants, and funding.

• Faster production of training materials.

• Adds value to companies by helping them meet their B-BBEE scorecard requirements.

• Graduates will gain skills in important roles like instructional design, content development, and e-learning.

• They also receive real-world experience by working with various industries and sectors.

• Graduates are mentored and supervised by specialists, ensuring they get the right skills and hands-on training.

• They gain exposure to different sectors, which helps them become more versatile and employable.

• The project runs for 24 months.

• Each group of 20 graduates develops 120 learning products.

• New learning products are created every 3 months, which means consistent output and quick turnaround.

Each person produces more than R 1m worth (development value) of learning products - far exceeding the cost of the project.

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Cost recovery can take place through a mix of grants; tax rebates; tax incentives; or by leveraging the value of products developed.  The mix depends on the client – e.g. public sector clients are not eligible for the rebates and are not required to achieve BBBEE scores. 

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We can demonstrate/model this depending on which clients we approach, but private sector clients could recover as much as 75% of total project costs through these mechanisms, which means the product value would cost them roughly 20% of market price and significantly improve their BBBEE score.  Public sector clients could recover roughly a third of costs, which means they would pay roughly 50% of market-related price per product.

The Incubator fills a major skills gap in the SA education and training market (e-development capacity).  The capacity can be deployed to address industry or company-specific needs; or to address the shortage of future and digital skills. 

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The ID&e-LD Incubator helps produce online training materials at 43% lower cost than the market rate if outsourced, even without cost-recovery.

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Existing incentive schemes could additionally allow private sector clients to recover up to 70% of total product costs. Public sector clients could recover a third of project costs. 

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The Incubator helps private sector clients meet B-BBEE requirements for skills development, community, and enterprise development.

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For clients attempting to build in-house e-development capacity, the Incubator provides a faster, more reliable and cost-effective mechanism than typical recruitment strategies. 

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The training materials created can be sold to generate additional revenue for the business.