Firms Augment Training with Online Courses
By Sherwood Ross
Sat May 4, 3:57 PM ET
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. (Reuters) - Corporate America, keeping an eye on the bottom line, is helping employees improve their skills and knowledge by supplementing classroom training with online instruction.
This "blended learning" approach enables employers to upgrade staff performance more quickly and so grasp a bigger market share, authorities on business education say.
Tammy Galvin, executive editor of Training magazine in Minneapolis, said that driving the expansion of both "fixed and virtual" in-house learning facilities is a newfound recognition of employee value by companies.
"They are beginning to place a premium on human capital," she said. "Issues such as time-to-market and time-to-knowledge are in the forefront of companies' launch of a new product."
Last year, employers spent $57 billion to train their workers, up 5 percent over 2000, the magazine found.
The number of organizations with on-site "universities" to instruct staff has increased steadily -- from 400 in 1990 to 1,500 in 1997 to 2,200 today -- said Jeanne Meister, president of Corporate University Xchange, a New York City-based business that helps companies revamp their training departments.
After polling 130 corporate training executives last year, Meister learned the portion of their education delivered by technology was 18 percent. The executives -- some of whom now go by the title of Chief Learning Officer -- predicted this figure will rise to 43 percent by 2005.
The new blended learning, Meister said, usually involves asking employees to turn to the Web first ("Read these chapters and answer the questions!") so that afterwards they can spend less time in the classroom but get more out of it.
"Blended learning is the rage in corporate America," said Joe Dougherty, of Stamford, Conn., president and chief executive officer of NETg Wave and Course Technology companies at Thomson Corporation.
BLENDED SCHOOLING
The blended schooling, he said, incorporates printed text and classroom-based training with online content, simulations, and mentoring. He described it as a "learn-by-doing approach" of the sort adopted years ago by medical schools and more recently picked up by graduate schools of business.
Last February, Thomson surveyed 128 employees at varied organizational levels in a wide range of industries. It found blended learning produced a 159 percent leap in employee performance compared to the exclusive use of either classroom or online instruction, Dougherty said.
President Donnee Ramelli of General Motors University, in Detroit, said GM's electronic education of employees has expanded from less than 1 percent of all hours taught a year ago to 14 percent today and is expected to grow to at least 25 percent in the near future.
"Before, they just used to send somebody off to a couple of weeks at the University of Michigan, Harvard, or MIT. But now companies are requesting a program customized to their company and industry," Corporate University Xchange's Meister said.
"Employees might take an online version of a university professor's course and then have the professor come in to answer questions," she said -- a radical shift from the way in which businesses formerly used academic talent.
"Corporations are becoming very tough customers of universities," GMU's Ramelli said, as companies attempt to "align their corporate university and business strategies."
To encourage employee involvement, GMU installed an internal Web site "where you can go in, search for courses, create a personal development plan and sign up all by yourself," Ramelli said.
"You can take courses from technology and executive leadership or you can learn how to run an office better, reduce conflict and manage change," he said. The automobile maker last year reported 75,000 Web enrollments for its 1,500 courses, largely from among its 86,000 management and technical staffers.
Although GM and McDonald's played pioneer roles in putting the "corporate university" on the map, many non-profits, State and Federal agencies are scrambling to catch up, authorities said.
Looking ahead, Meister said corporate learning chiefs plan to convert their universities into profit centers by enrolling their suppliers and customers. What's more, they are forming consortiums with accredited colleges and universities "to offer a specific degree for an industry." |
