In-house Subject Matter Expert vs. outsourced Subject Matter Expert. Which one should you prefer?

An SME is mostly remembered when the time comes for curriculum designing. The most important role played by an SME or Subject Matter Expert is to design a course or curriculum. There are roughly two ways to choose a Subject Matter Expert:

• Employing a Subject Matter Expert that is as of now a part of your organization
• Outsourcing a Subject Matter Expert

In this blog, we will analyze the pros and cons of each of the options as each of them has got both advantages and disadvantages. It is significant to know about the pros and cons in detail before you employ them in your organization.

Option 1- In-House Subject Matter Experts

Let us first focus on the perks of employing in-house subject matter experts. You may expect a quick response in case of employing your in-house subject matter experts. Another good thing is this, they are familiar with the workflow of your organization and might have worked on similar projects earlier. Thus, it will save a lot of your time in explaining the work and negotiating with the cost. Moreover, it is also easy to communicate with your in-house SME during the project.

However, keeping all the advantages in mind, we must not forget about the disadvantages. The in-house subject matter experts might keep themselves engaged with other projects as well and may not be available always. As the in-house SMEs work on several projects, they might be less experienced on the specif project you are assigning them. This might hamper the quality of the result that you are expecting from them.

Pros:

• Quick response time
• Acquainted with work process

Cons:

• Less accessibility
• Less field knowledge.

Option 2- Outsourced Subject Matter Expert

There are several benefits of hiring SMEs from professional subject matter expert companies. Being an outsider, he or she might be able to put forward a different perspective to the content. He or she might also share new and innovative ways of working as per his or her experience working with his or her team. In addition to that, an outsourced SME can add a lot more background information to the content to make it more insightful. Apart from that, an outsourced SME will dedicate a certain amount of time to this project and will be able to deliver the work within a specified deadline. This will help the organizations to plan their workflow accordingly. As far as the cost is concerned, these subject matter specialists charge a nominal amount which can fit any budget.

However, outsourcing a domain subject matter expert has got its own set of disadvantages as well which should not be overlooked upon. As an outsider, they might not be available always, and communicating with them might get a bit difficult. They are also not supposed to be aware of the workflow of your organization. Due to these reasons, there might be a slight delay in passing information from the organization to the Subject matter expert. This could hamper the overall workflow of both the subject matter expert and the organization.

Pros:

• New viewpoint/diverse information
• Settled upon accessibility

Cons:

• Slower response time.
• Unfamiliar with the organization’s work process.

Conclusion:

This article intended to note down all the pros and cons of both in-house subject matter experts and outsourced subject matter experts. Employing the correct subject matter expert is crucial in terms of the quality and precision of the content that you are planning to develop which is updated, relevant, and insightful. Keeping the pros and cons in mind, it will be easier to choose the correct option for every organization.

Acadecraft is the fastest growing e-learning content development company providing accurate, innovative, and customized assessment development, copyediting, curriculum development, typesetting, localization, online tutoring services worldwide.