CustomerCentrix

Get on the E-train.

By:Dylan Tweney Issue: January 2001
From www.brandon-hall.net

Companies have been caught in a bind when it comes to training. Teaching new skills is critical to keeping employees motivated and productive. But classroom instruction is often expensive, slow, and ineffective. Besides, it takes people away from their jobs: Every minute your salespeople are sitting in a classroom listening to someone teach effective selling techniques is a minute they're not out there selling. How do you provide effective professional education without sticking people in mind-deadening classrooms for days at a time? E-training may be just the ticket.

E-training promises more effective teaching techniques by integrating audio, video, animation, text, and interactive material to help each student learn at his or her optimum pace. But the real argument for online training is that it can eliminate one of the biggest costs of real-world training: travel. According to Brandon Hall of online-learning research firm Brandon-Hall.com, e-learning has produced training budget savings of 40 to 60 percent for large organizations such as Ernst & Young, IBM, the Internal Revenue Service, and Rockwell Collins. IBM, for instance, claims that its e-training initiative, Basic Blue, which teaches basic management skills to new managers, saved the company $200 million in 1999. Eliminating travel expenses formerly required to bring employees and instructors to a central classroom accounts for much of the savings. With an online course, employees can learn from any Internet-connected PC, right from their desks in the home office.

Attracted by such potentially huge savings, companies are pouring money into online training. International Data Corp. estimates that U.S. companies' 2000 bill for e-learning technologies, courses, and services will be $2.2 billion, and predicts that the expenditure will grow to $11.4 billion by 2003. By comparison, corporations spend $54 billion annually on all training (online and off), according to a Training Magazine study of 1,347 companies with 100 employees or more.