John Cleeseís training days may be numbered - 05/2001

John Cleeseís training days may be numbered, as corporate education and training is entering a transitional period that will revolutionise the way that we educate our staff.

Milton Keynes based ebc is advising companies to forget what they have learnt, and get ready to move into the world of e-learning. Global organisation Unilever has already discovered e-learning to its distinct advantage, increasing revenue in North America by $US20 million last year.

Graham Mackie, sales director at ebc said: Video, until recently, was the single biggest breakthrough in the training market and coupled with classroom based training, is the way corporate learning has been implemented within industry throughout the world. However technology has opened up other means of delivery such as CD-Rom. Then once the Internet took off it became apparent to us that this was an area that was ripe for development and discovery.

Graham and his team are ideally placed to suggest that we are in the midst of a training revolution. ebc was the most prolific producer of video based training material during the last decade, servicing more than 600 regular clients.

Graham continued: Unfortunately training, and particularly classroom based training has often been considered unproductive. A training manager has to justify to the business that sending staff on a course is going to be of major benefit to the company.

It isn't just the expense of the course itself, there are travel and accommodation costs to consider and the loss of man hours which has negative short term effects for both the company and its workforce.

Finally, even if the course is deemed a success, it is almost impossible to establish what has been learnt and which of the new skills are being used within the workplace. Recent research indicates, that after 12 months, 93% of learners who have attended short courses do not use the skills they had learnt. Until now, these are the difficulties that training and human resources managers have been confronted with for years.

www.ebc.co.uk