e2train Launches Kallidus 8

Kallidus 8 provides new Learning And Performance system with BBC/ iGoogle style web gadgets to create a new learner environment combining formal and external informal learning opportunities. Kallidus 8 comes with innovative new reporting capabilities delivering valuable business information to managers and the boardroom

Launch comes as a new e2train survey finds that over 87% of L&D professionals believe there needs to be a stronger link between learning and development and core business processes and strategy. 45% of respondents would provide more comprehensive or frequent reports to the board if they had the necessary tools to do so.

e2train, the UKís leading supplier of learning and performance technologies, today announced the launch of Kallidus 8, an enterprise-wide learning and performance environment. The new system offers an easy to use ëiGoogle styleí web gadget learner interface which will enable learning professionals to integrate formal and informal learning within a single solution. e2train has also built a new reporting platform into the system, making it one of the most powerful mid-market enterprise-wide learning solutions available on the market today.

A recent survey from industry analysts, Bersin & Associates, found that 68% of knowledge workers now feel that their biggest learning problem is an ìoverwhelming volume of information.î Similarly, one of the key challenges learning and development professionals face today is how best to make use of informal learning and use it to generate valuable business and performance-based information.

Kallidus 8 helps learning professionals manage this information by enabling them to specify an environment for their learner that combines their own formal learning and performance operations with links to external tools, informal or otherwise. This means that a far wider range of learning can now be delivered within a structured and easy-to-navigate environment. In this way, informal learning can operate seamlessly with more formal learning, such as instructor-led teaching, e-learning and blended learning.

Kallidus 8ís new ëiGoogle styleí web-gadget-driven interface raises the bar on the learner experience, bringing it into line, navigationally, with the webís most popular sites. The new interface will also enable the administrator to easily specify user profiles which provide their own set of windows and tools. Perhaps even more important in the long term, however, is that Kallidus 8 has a greatly extended reporting capability. The new reports enable users to capture performance and learning data and represent this information in tabular and graphical formats. This will allow learning professionals to capture the most powerful metrics - combined from all their activities – and deliver that data straight to the organisationsí top executives to create real business value.

The launch comes at a time when there is a clear market demand for new ways of learning and reporting on such learning. A survey of over 100 senior L&D managers held only this month by e2train in partnership with the Learning and Skills Group found that 87% of respondents believe there needs to be a stronger link between learning & development and core business processes and strategy. The survey also found that over 60% of managers had a positive attitude towards learning as long as the benefits are clear.

Linking learning closer to organisational needs was also deemed to be the single greatest personal learning challenge faced by L&D managers today (28%) followed by increasing L&Dís profile within the organisation (17%) and social learning and the use of Web 2.0 tools (16%). 45% of respondents said they would provide more comprehensive or more frequent reports to the board, if they had the necessary tools to do so. Currently, learning is reported on and discussed at boardroom level by the majority of companies on a monthly (35%) or quarterly basis (39%) basis. 7% of organisations have no board level discussions regarding the value of learning.

Said e2trainís Managing Director, Rob Caul:

ìThe corporate learning landscape continues to evolve. New surveys tell us that the use of formal e-learning programmes is growing but we also now have to cater for the dramatic rise in the use of informal learning tools. As learning professionals that presents us with new challenges. To be really effective we need to provide managed access to these tools from the learner perspective and, above all, we need to understand how all these operations can be rolled together so they are shown to be contributing to business value.î

ìWe are convinced that Kallidus 8 can meet these challenges, providing a truly collaborative, flexible, enterprise-wide learning solution that can generate and disseminate critical information and whose reporting capabilities can provide real resonance with managers right up into the boardroom.î

Kallidus 8 is an affordable and completely scalable system which deploys, manages and reports on all forms of learning via the Internet or intranet. Key features of Kallidus 8 include:

A easy to use and intuitive set of learner pages which can be assembled and specified by the learning professional from web gadgets creating a personal management ëdashboardí for the user from which they can access relevant training information.

An innovative new SAP-based business reporting tool, which enables business metrics gathered from Kallidus 8 to be disseminated across the organisation and incorporated into other management-wide systems. Kallidus 8 also tracks learning investments to determine where they add value.

Kallidus Performance 8 enables users to define skills and competencies, which can in turn be specified within job roles. Kallidus Performance will then manage the performance review and employee assessment processes allowing further training interventions to be set against these processes.

The survey was coordinated by e2train in partnership with the Learning and Skills Group, an international community of learning and development professionals, and took place in June 2009. 134 people from the Learning and Skills Groupís membership base answered the survey across 14 separate industry sectors. 39% of respondents had over 5,000 employees in their organisation and 28% between 1,000 and 4,999 employees. Over 50% said that they influenced learning strategy within their organisation with 43% responsible for setting the learning strategy for the entire organisation, division or department.