The Business Case For ELearning [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Recommendations on Leading E-Learning

A study in the October 2002 issue of Training Magazine reported that of the 52-billion dollars spent on training in the United States, nearly 72 percent was spent on staff costs. At BearingPoint, the staff costs comprise about 20 percent of the total learning and development budget. Instructional design practices and systems integration practices essentially require similar skills. If training leaders commit to developing cost-effective approaches to delivering learning, they could well become key players in helping their organization's bottom line instead of remaining easy targets for budget cuts and layoffs.

When a training leader assumes the role of a CLO, there is a tacit agreement that instead of focusing on discrete training events he will leverage e-business tools to re-engineer the delivery of learning organization-wide. (See more on this in Chapter 14, "Practitioners' Views on the Business Advantages of E-Learning.") The team at Bearing Point contends that a training leader can preserve an organization's knowledge inventory despite budget reductions by relying on Internet learning. Instead of viewing their function as training and viewing themselves as trainers, today's training managers should view learning as a business-transformation opportunity and view themselves as change agents.