Bridging The Gap – On Line Tutorial – Part One

e-Learning readiness or preparing your company.

As with any new or changing strategy within your company it is vital that you have a few fundamental concepts in place.  For e-Learning you should have ideas around the following basic elements.

1)    For the business.

• Some kind of training needs analysis.  If there has been any recent change in your business, new product launch, different regulations etc. then this will generate some demand for training that can be used to pull through the strategy for training all the employees.
• Linking in with the business priorities and strategies.  If it is your organisations strategy to “become a quality supplier…” for example then there must be an ongoing training plan in place to support this goal, if it is your intention to achieve quality accreditation then this will demand a structured training plan.
• Look out for any organisational issues that may impede the training plan, political power plays, or inter departmental competitiveness.
• As with anything new, it requires some people to change either their behaviour or way of thinking.  With some people this can be difficult.  We will return to this topic later in this guide.

2)    For the employees.

• Some people may think that the benefits to your employees of being trained are so great that they will embrace the strategy with out a second thought.  This may not be the case, it is possible that many of your staff has been way from any sort of formal education for many years and the thought of any training can be quite frightening.  Make sure there are support systems in place for these people.
• If you have a large number of employees then creating a skills assessment for every one may not be possible, unless you can rely on the assistance of the line managers pick selected employees or departments.  Then these can be used to benchmark the success of your training program.

3)    Financial

• Define your success criteria.  This will depend on your business, it will be something along the lines of; reduction in recruitment of senior staff by x%.  Reducing the time to bring to market a new product by y%, etc.
• Return on investment.  With many of the benefits being intangible it is important to pick areas where clear financial benefits can be measured.  These can include the increase in productivity of workgroups, reduction in errors made etc.  The following sections of the guide will show you how to raise the skill levels of your employees without a huge investment.  This will make your RoI calculations easier.

The next chapter in this on-line tutorial will continue on the theme of preparing your company and look at skills assessment ad gap analysis.