Interestingly, more than 80% of respondents say that enabling employees to learn is important for their business but more than 30% of those say that their employees are so busy firefighting for survival at the moment that they have little or no time to undertake training. In terms of barriers, time is the major factor for almost 25% of the respondents, with organisations now being more aware of the indirect costs of training, such as time off the job, being a barrier to increasing training at the moment. This leads to many organisations moving to e-learning as the solution as it reduces the cost per head of training but 42% think that appropriate off-the-shelf content is hard to find.
So what does that say about our industry at the moment? Well, for me, we are not doing our jobs properly if we are not clearly able to show the return on investment, including indirect costs which we often, conveniently, forget to include in ROI calculations (where we do them at all). If we can’t show the benefit of the training that employees are undertaking, why are we offering it at all?
And the off-the-shelf e-learning problem? Well, once again, there are few really good off-the-shelf providers and our customers are now becoming really good at see the wool that has been pulled over their eyes for some time about converting a PowerPoint presentation and calling it e-learning.
Let this be a warning to us. We have got to start offering our customers what they need and demonstrating that our offering meets that need.
