Technology is playing an increasingly important role in many learning & development strategies. ING’s David Nieuwenburg explores the many benefits of e-learning, including tighter processes, clearer ROI and better outcomes thanks to learning management systems
Technology is playing an increasingly important role in many learning & development strategies. ING’s David Nieuwenburg explores the many benefits of e-learning, including tighter processes, clearer ROI and better outcomes thanks to learning management systems
Despite e-learning being a relatively recent phenomenon in the corporate world, the cost-efficient and result-effective aspects of computer-based training (CBT) were already known for some time in more hands-on environments.
An e-learning platform based on drivers such as accessibility, reusability, interoperability and comparability enables HR to robustly benchmark learning, training and skills as well as implement a coherent framework for performance management. Four stages can be identified with the introduction of e-learning. Each stage has its own drivers and deliverables.
Stage one: facts and skills
Stage one is the introduction of e-learning to the company. Gut feeling indicates that electronic distribution is a relatively cheap channel, but exactly how much cheaper? There is an ‘e’ prefix: is it an IT project – will it deliver in time? Do the assumptions in the business case hold? How effective is learning actually behind a screen?
These questions often originate from a natural resistance to change. Feelings of discomfort must be met by facts. At ING the focus of stage one centred around:
• Measurable skills. Select training materials that, for example, address mandatory skills or knowledge like compliance training
• Cheap and simple. Select a library portfolio of no-nonsense courseware that addresses skills that are naturally transferred to the workplace, such as desktop courses like PowerPoint presentation skills, or in the case of an IT department, programming courses
• Common theme. For a global company, English skills are necessary for communication both within and external to the company. In the Asia-Pacific region, global English courseware was selected for business units in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong Thailand and Malaysia. With a common theme, online student behaviour can be compared and understood. Information on IT aspects (such as bandwidth), as well as training policy at business unit level (such as, are participants allowed to learn during working hours?) can later be used to extract key drivers for effective e-learning.
• Measure preliminary savings on training delivery and administration. Savings on travel and lodging, time and effort to enroll in a course, time and effort to create training programs that address skill gaps are, for example, relatively easily measurable
Whereas the main fact finding purpose of stage one is for the company to get a clearer understanding of the benefits, the ultimate end users, the employees, also need to understand the benefits of e-learning to them. Because this is often not so clear in the beginning, at the end of stage one ING organised a gift campaign. All employees taking a course in a specific month were entitled to a gift, along with a compliment card from the chairman.
Stage two: knowledge and collaboration
With the measurable indicators of stage one chartered, e-learning will get a chance to be tried out more formally as an option for training delivery and administration. It is in stage two that proof must be found that, be it as a full substitute of selected traditional courseware or as a part of so called blended training programs, the advantages of e-learning will stretch into the company. It is the first step out of HR or the training department.
Courseware facts or skills (formal learning) are only part of the knowledge repository of an employee or, indeed, the company. Implicit knowledge, experience knowledge, people-network knowledge, preferred priority knowledge and so on, comprise the collective memory of any person or company.
The distribution platform for e-learning courseware, or the learning management system (LMS), can be used as well for horizontal knowledge sharing: learn from colleagues and peers. In the most basic form this would be a button that shows who within the company is taking the same course. Add to this an email address, and the employee struggling with a question on time management in a project management course has easy access to fellow-students.
It can even go one step further. The LMS can function as a vehicle to organise selected projects around. Assigning people to a project measuring results, using bulletin board, sending out alerts and updates and so on are standard features on many of the latest LMS packages.
At ING some study groups were created, headed by functional heads. The invitation to study the same course together within a period of say, two weeks, makes the e-learning experience a less lonely act.
Stage three: Identity and mindset
As cases are found in which the LMS and e-learning will provide a platform or solution for training, learning, knowledge sharing and networking, interactions among and between functionally or geographically dispersed departments or business units increase.
Working together, studying the same materials, learning from one another, or striving to reach the same goals, are clear ingredients of an increased sense of company belongingness. For a small company without multiple outlets, divisions or regions this might not be a high priority issue, but for companies that work on many markets across various regions, the mindset of an employee is a known branding asset.
Doing a mindset course or an introductory induction course for newly joined employees in an e-learning framework has the explicit advantage of bypassing potential teacher biases, or particular classroom dynamics that are unique with each group of students. An e-learning course, clinically tracking and tracing the study progress, guarantees that all (new) employees will be up at the same level, with the same amount of exposure to the “company-ness”.
One of the life insurance business units of ING decided to have its marketing representatives, the managers in the branches that maintain the relationship with the agents, take an assessment on the LMS. The assessment was linked to a course library of legal courses, financial courses and tax courses, bought from a local third party. Depending on the outcome of the assessment the marketing representative were offered eight courses in those three fields: some had to take more legal courses than others and some had to take more tax courses.
In the end, the gap between skills of the marketing representatives in this geographically wide and diverse country was considerably bridged. Both the company identity as well as the mobility of the marketing representatives had improved.
Moving from stage to stage
Going from one stage to the other is not an easy road. All stages have their benefits, and for a strong acceptance and understanding of the potential of e-learning it is long-term suboptimal to try to skip, or hurry through one of the stages.
In stage one a proof of ‘obvious’ or hard cost savings is possible to create (compare e-learning prices with traditional ones). Yet, measuring increased revenues can only happen in soft terms, referring to the future: a weakness for which HR needs to provide refuge.
Unfortunately in stage two and three both cost savings and increased revenues can primarily be measured in soft terms: how, for example, to estimate the value of horizontal learning? And how much cheaper is it to construct projects around an informational hub? To profit/loss bottom line decision-makers this is a weakness that could endanger further moving on.
But the proof is in the pudding. Efficiency and effectiveness of, for example, projects with collaboration tools on an LMS, will manifest when trying out. The value of a newly created network of employees working on a same projest or doing the same course can be understood in retrospect: do these employees spontaneously contact one another when there is a similar problem to tackle.
Since HR departments, training departments (like a sales force education division) a company’s project management bureau (having the project documented and accessible for future reference) all benefit “softly” from stages two and three, it must be their strong will and vision that will move an e-learning LMS through to the next stage in which the company as a whole will benefit; measurable in both a soft and hard way.
Stage four: employee efficiency
As the process of embedding e-learning firmly in the company, old habits make place for new ways of working within the new paradigm of continuously intensification of the ‘e-factor’.
When information, knowledge and skills merge but also diverge from a single shared platform like an LMS, the LMS can become a tool to arrange some aspects of daily work around.
The LMS, as it is applied at various ING business units, is also a strong tool for offering help with competency management. Through a questionnaire, or survey, an employee in the LMS can start doing a 180 degree assessment or invite others to get their 360 degree assessment done.
Based on the outcome of the survey, the employee will see their results on the competency measured compared to the ING standard, the average of other colleagues, or to his own competency as measured in the past.
Linking the outcome of the competency score to the course library the employee would be offered a suggestion from the courseware specifically addressing the competency.
E-learning, LMS, extranets and intranets
The cautious or suspicious reader might have found arguments for isolating some positive findings on e-learning and to attribute these to (any) other digital hub, like an intranet or an extranet.
We can be very agreeable here. If an extranet or intranet indeed is easy to operate for both user and publisher, trainer and student, agent and employee; and if it incorporates catalogues with training courses from third-parties as well as internally made; and if training administration, but also tracking and tracing of training results are possible and are fed into the HR systems like PeopleSoft or SAP; and if collaboration tools are part of the functionalities of the extra or intranet environment; and if (horizontal) knowledge sharing goes one step further than presenting non-interactive bundles of hyperlinks; and if the owner of the intranet or extranet is not an IT, e-Biz or Communications island-department, but an omnipresent department that fosters and protects training and networking of people, also in the unclear stages; and ... then such an intranet or extranet will most probably be able to achieve the same benefits of getting e-learning and its LMS platform embedded in the company.
David Nieuwenburg is ING’s regional e-learning manager Asia Pacific. He can be contacted at [email protected]
