Industry Insights – Lars Unneberg, Mohive
In our recent roadshow events through out Europe, many interesting insights were shared in the way rapid e-learning is changing how training is being managed in HR departments.
One key area experiencing a revolution in terms of planning and management is the training budgeting process.
Classically, the planning process would identify a couple of key e-learning courses that would be developed the following year, with each of these courses requiring a large funding commitment. Since only select courses were chosen and allocated funds, substantial time and energy was invested in selecting the right courses and confirming necessary approvals and buy in. As a result, planning was often completed and signed off up to 12 months before course development actually started. Consequently training course development was an extremely ridged and structured process ill equipped for the changing requirements or skill deficits of the company.
As is the case with the influence of technology in many parts of the business today, impressive improvements in content creation software solutions have driven the swift adoption of rapid e-learning.
Projects tend to be smaller, created faster and require only small funds.
As enterprise rapid e-learning continues to develop momentum, it has begun to influence how training is planned and budged for. Typically today’s new style rapid e-learning projects will allocate a coach to the SME. Since this coach sits at the centre of the content creation process funds are only required to support elements such as small video clips, etc. As a result, these projects tend to be smaller, created faster and require only a tiny allocation of funds. This new freedom has seen spending focus shift from a couple of large pots of money, to small allocations of funding that support different business unit’s needs on an “as requested” basis throughout the year. These costs could include, for example, a photo shoot to build the image library for SMEs or a small video shoot as mentioned above.
This new flexibility has also affected the role and perception of training, which now has a dynamic more supportive and enabling than before.
And being able to quickly react to opportunities and change has also meant that training and knowledge management have become important strategic levers that directly deliver against business objectives.