E-learning and Corporate Communications

The explosive growth of the Internet economy in the past decade has led many companies to raise their expectations of employee levels of information intake. Due to advances in technology, mergers, acquisitions, market volatility, and competitive pressures, today's employees must be empowered to respond effectively to these increasing demands. Ensuring that employees are able to learn new skills and assimilate vast amounts of new information on top of existing skills will guarantee a company's success in tough markets.

Areas that benefit from a robust e-learning and corporate communications solution are

• Product Sales Sales employees' knowledge of their organization's current and upcoming products and those of the competition is important to winning a potential sales opportunity. If a formidable competitive vendor is also involved in the account and has the necessary competitive ammunition, it may win the sales opportunity.

• Customer Support Customer support representatives must be kept abreast of their departments' methods and procedures that may change very frequently.

• Quality Assurance For quality assurance employees, applying quality control mechanisms in dynamic manufacturing settings can offer a challenge with respect to keeping quality levels of their products sustained.

To facilitate the learning process, your organization must implement a solution that affords quick retrieval of relevant information and enables employees to learn material most suited for them at their leisure. Traditional training methods, such as CD- or DVD-ROM-based Computer Based Training (CBT) and classrooms have proven costly and time consuming in today's Internet culture.

The goals of e-learning are reduced training costs, easy access to educational content, increased collaboration, and improved accountability. Reduced corporate training costs are a major testament to the benefits of e-learning. E-learning solutions reduce these types of training expenses: travel costs, accommodations, training facilities, and time spent away from the office for numerous employees to meet at a headquarters.

E-learning is a way for organizations to provide education through networks. Today's networks provide the medium that classrooms, boardrooms, and lecture halls provided in the past. E-learning solutions can provide educational content live or on-demand. Live solutions can provide an experience similar to a classroom setting, including interactive verbal discussions, online whiteboards, instant messaging questions, and answers between teacher and student or student-to-student discussions.

Some users may be unable to attend training due to schedule constraints, or users may learn at different paces or have differing levels of knowledge of the material. For these reasons, on-demand e-learning may be beneficial. On-demand content can be viewed at any time by the learner but with the same components and effectiveness as a classroom or live e-learning solution.