|
How to embark on your eLearning adventure? Making sense of the environment
By 2003, 50 percent of all training may be online. Where does your company stand? If you are in the training profession or industry, are you poised to survive and thrive during this revolution, or die off with the old guard?Education and training worldwide is becoming a huge business. It is estimated that education and training from pre-school to retirement is a $2 trillion marketplace. In the United States, it is 8 percent of the gross domestic product, second only to healthcare. One company, Cisco, has invested $20 million in television advertising that demonstrates eLearning for children and adults.eLearning is taking off like wildfire around the globe. Organizations are finding ways to save 50 percent of the time invested in training, and cut one-third to one-half the cost. The advantages loom large, yet understanding what needs to happen to pave the way for eLearning in your organization can be overwhelming. The technology changes daily, as do the training needs.
You are not alone as you grapple with issues about the latest methods and tools; in fact you are in good company. In this article, we will look into some case studies of companies that are adopting eLearning into their corporate culture. We will share advice on how to integrate eLearning into your training; how to build a business case for eLearning; how to evaluate eLearning; how to understand packaged training systems for eLearning that are on the market today; and a key to understanding some of the buzzwords in the industry.
Building a business case: success stories of cost-savings One way to build a business case for eLearning and how it can help your organization is to look at case studies of success. PriceWaterhouseCoopers is a firm that provides accounting and business consulting services. Prior to the merge, Price Waterhouse created a multimedia program entitled Terminal RISK to train the professional audit staff. Employees take the course during the third year of training. Terminal RISK serves as a prerequisite for further training, and more than 7,000 people in 50 countries have taken advantage of this training.
To evaluate the effectiveness of the program, Price Waterhouse conducted a training effectiveness review. These were the findings: compared to traditional classroom training, the multimedia program reduced by 50 percent the time needed for learners to attain the same level of knowledge.Price Waterhouse followed up the evaluation with a return-on-investment analysis for the course, in comparison to traditional instructor-led training. The company examined the total cost for development and delivery over five years. The cost per learner for the technology-based training was $106 – as opposed to $760 per learner for the instructor-led training version of the course.
Another example can be found at Intel Corp., where the focus of business is to design, manufacture and market microprocessors for personal computers. The Logistics Systems training group previously offered traditional classroom instruction to the 800 employees for learning new applications. The training group figured out how to provide embedded, technology-based training in the applications themselves, thus eliminating the need for classroom-led training. In a comparison of hours off-the-job for training on one particular project of this group at Intel, traditional training would have required up to 12 hours, while embedded training required up to two hours. A 10-hour savings multiplied by 800 employees amounts to a lot of productivity recaptured.
The third case study involves Storage Technology, a company that reaped 47 percent cost savings. Storage Technology provides large storage hardware for mainframe computers. The cost-per-unit for this equipment can approach one-half million dollars. Storage Technology employs a field force of 1,500 technicians to provide technical support. The company previously trained the technicians using a lecture and lab format in which the technicians traveled to Colorado for a four-to-10 day training session. Several years ago, the company began to convert the format of the training from lecture and lab to technology-based training in which the technicians received training at their local offices on a computer. The savings from this conversion were substantial.Total Training Costs: Lecture/lab Training vs. Technology-based Training
Comparison of total costs over three years at Storage Technology for development and delivery of another course in Lecture/lab format ($3,291,327) vs. technology-based format ($1,748,327).
Cost savings for Storage Technology was due to two factors in particular: compression of training time and reduction in travel expenses. A comparison of total training costs over three years at Storage Technology for development and delivery of a program showed costs for the lecture/lab format at $3,291,327 vs. costs for the technology format at $1,748,327.To build a business case for your organization, we recommend that you :
|
