The current economic climate has prompted many companies who were only considering eLearning before to pursue it now. Providing eLearning opportunities can save companies money by allowing employees access to training 24 hours a day, seven days a week, across all office locations and divisions, even internationally. Companies can reduce the travel and infrastructure expenses for educators and staff to attend face-to-face training workshops. At the same time, organizations will continue to provide the training that ensures best practices, reduces errors and cycle times, as well as fulfills compliance expectations. The universality of eLearning makes it an efficient and cost-effective way to share and distribute ideas and best practices across the organization.

By taking advantage of eLearning opportunities, your company will have an advantage over competition in the current economic climate. You can keep employees on the cutting edge of new technology and best practices, and increase their fluency and knowledge about your products and services. Online training programs are more efficient and flexible than customized face-to-face training, making information more accessible to a broader audience. Furthermore, eLearning allows you to track employee achievements, mastery of concepts, and  - most importantly - skills.

You may find internal constraints to implementing an eLearning program. Determining affordability is the first step, as online corporate learning is contingent on selecting a software platform.  Once you have decided to implement eLearning, you may encounter management apathy or resistance to change. Human Resources, training staff, supervisors, and managers may also resist going down this new learning path. Helping leadership see the value in eLearning, both financial and from a content perspective, will help to overcome resistance. Future blog posts will provide data and lessons learned from other companies that can help you with this.

If your organization is thinking about eLearning and you find yourself scrambling to identify staff and tools with no organized strategy in place, an experience eLearning consultant can help.  A consultant will work with you to identify which types of learning can best support your business objectives. When the answer is eLearning, a consultant will work with you to create eLearning objectives, map out strategies to meet goals, overcome obstacles, and work within constraints.

Look for a consultant with corporate training experience, eLearning expertise, and an understanding of how developing personnel will impact the operations of your organization. A consultant can work with you to develop your strategy on the front-end, and you can choose to retain the consultant to manage implementation long-term. A consultant does more than just create a plan and help you implement it. He or she will also help to assure quality, advise you in the change management process, conduct analysis of your efforts, and apply feedback to improve your programs along the way.