Every organisation weighing a custom digital learning build eventually hears the same warning: send the production offshore and the quality falls away. In my experience that warning is usually right — but not for the reason most people assume, and not in a way that can't be solved. I should know. I've spent three decades on every side of it.
Barbados, 1996
My first real experience of offshore production was at CBT Systems, where I was responsible for a team in Barbados building training content. We could not get the work to the standard it needed to be, and managing it from a distance only widened the gap. In 1996 the company sent me to Barbados for six months to turn it around on the ground. I did — the quality came right. But the lesson underneath it was the one that mattered: it had taken a senior person relocating for half a year to fix what distance had broken, and that was never going to be sustainable. We reduced our dependency on the centre. The first thing offshore taught me was how easily it goes wrong when you hand the work over and hope.
Cape Town, 1997
The following year, CBT asked me to help a colleague who was relocating to Cape Town set up a new offshore development business. I moved there temporarily to help stand it up, then came home and managed it remotely. That business is still trading today — still producing learning content at scale, three decades on. Setting it up taught me the other half of what Barbados had started: offshore can absolutely work, and work for the long term, but only when it is built properly and run by people who understand the work, not simply instructed to do it cheaply.
SourceSkills, 2000–2010
In 2000 I founded SourceSkills and built it into a primary producer of highly interactive courseware for Skillsoft, one of the world's largest corporate learning publishers. At its peak the business ran a team of thirty in Dublin across instructional design, editorial, QA, graphics, animation, audio and project management — close to our client, with a relationship to match.
What happened over the following years is the story of the whole sector. To stay competitive in a global market, the industry pushed production costs down, year after year. We met it the hard way first — by rebuilding our production processes from the ground up and applying lean discipline to courseware years before it was common in our industry. That kept us at the table, and for a while it let us grow. But the pressure didn't ease, and by 2005 the only way to keep going was to partner with a development centre in India, which we did, and held right through to the end.
I won't dress up what that cost. Like much of the sector, keeping the business whole meant losing good people in Ireland and moving more of the work offshore. That race to the bottom played out across the entire industry, and a great deal of Irish and European talent was lost to it. SourceSkills reached around €3 million in revenue, more than 200 published titles and over 2,000 hours of structured content, and took the inaugural IT Training Gold Award before I exited in 2010. But the deeper thing I carried out of it was having watched, in real time, what relentless cost pressure does to an industry that hasn't worked out how to absorb it without hollowing out the product.
NIIT, and the pattern everywhere
Across later roles — including time at NIIT, one of the largest offshore learning operations in the world, and work with other Indian partners — I saw the same pattern from the inside every time. Businesses chased the cheaper offshore option, dealt with the offshore teams directly and entirely, and watched the quality of their learning fall. It was true then. It is still true now. It is the single most common reason a custom build disappoints the people who commissioned it.
The one conclusion — and why LearnFrame is built the way it is
Thirty years on every side of this taught me one thing, and it is the thing LearnFrame is built around: you cannot solve the offshore quality problem by going offshore alone. The model that actually holds keeps a senior, experienced core in Ireland — the people who own the client relationship and the standard — directing and managing the offshore team, backed by thirty years of offshore-management experience that is genuinely rare in this sector.
"You cannot solve the offshore quality problem by going offshore alone."
That gives you both halves at once. Strategic direction, editorial judgement, and a person you can actually talk to, all nearshore in Dublin. Production capacity and cost efficiency from an established team in Cape Town. And quality you can trust, because the work is run by the people who learned, the hard way, exactly how offshore production fails — and built the model specifically so it doesn't.
It isn't a theory, and it isn't a pitch. It's thirty years of evidence pointing at one conclusion.
If the offshore-quality question is what's giving you pause
If your certification body, training provider, or academy is weighing a custom build and the offshore-quality question is the thing giving you pause, that is precisely the problem this model was designed around. The Programme Design Decision Guide, and a conversation, are both a click away.