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What Gains the Commitment of People That Matter?
Many major e-learning vendors and industry leaders would have us view the advent of e-learning as the panacea of the future for progressive, savvy, and insightful companies, quick enough to take advantage of it. However, the truth is that many organizations, in their zeal to become leaders in this exciting field, frequently find themselves confronted with an unanticipated level of resistance to these new initiatives and an inability to overcome this resistance from one of several different sources:
Management and leadership
The Information Technology (IT) department
The training department itself
This resistance stems from many factors:
Prohibitively high up-front investment levels, compounded by a poor ability to quantify and clearly articulate the justification for those expenditures in terms of: their overall return to the business; longer-term impact on the learning population; and overall success criteria in terms of measuring the success or failure of the initiative.
Resistance to the integration of two traditionally separate areas-technology and training. Many training department managers are quick to point to insufficient bandwidth and technology robustness as the cause of failure of their e-learning training initiatives. On the other hand, an equal number of IT managers will happily reciprocate with distrust and skepticism about proposed e-learning products and solutions.
Massive change management challenges at all three levels in the organization are not supported with adequate planning and implementation efforts to foster adoption of the changes. This discourages management, IT, and the training department from undertaking the radical change efforts needed in how learning is delivered to, and received by, end users in the organization.
While there have been some highly-touted and admired corporate pioneers and leaders in e-learning initiative, such as Motorola and Dell Universities, among others, there is still a significant amount of concern about an organization’s ability to develop a cohesive roadmap for achieving that success. The inherent risk involved in embarking in a series of initiatives with high levels of expenditure, and relatively unclear demonstrable success factors, is itself a cause of resistance to beginning on the e-learning path.
While resistance to large-scale e-learning initiatives does provide a significant challenge, it is not an insurmountable one for most organizations. The importance of sustaining, enhancing, and leveraging human intellectual capital to achieve organizational success has become widely recognized. Younger generations are experiencing a total learning environment in their formative years, supported twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week by digital learning opportunities, and are demanding a similar commitment to intensive learning and professional development from their employers. Also, a leaner, more constrained economy is driving organizations to search for mechanisms to retool their existing workforce, at an increasingly more competitive rate, and on a larger, global scale. All of these challenges, opportunities, and constraints can be addressed by e-learning capabilities.
