E-Learning and the Changing Face of Corporate Training and Development

As much as erp is critical to a manufacturing supply chain environment, e-learning is critical in a knowledge dependent supply chain environment. Larry Pereira, Motorola Internet technologies and the advent of e-learning applications inmany organisations have made a fundamental diVerence to the way organ-isations deliver training and development content, activities and ex-periences to their employees. Some of the organisations at the fore-front of deploying e-learning technologies have been global corpora-tions and/or transaction processing intensive organisations, who typ-ically have diYculties assembling their staV for traditional classroom based training activities, either due to logistical diYculties or because of the impact this would have on work flows and business continuity. Such organisations have developed approaches to e-learning and com-petency development that overcome the logistical problems of conven-tional training by making innovative use of e-learning. This paper ex-amines the approaches used by several leading global, Australian and Asian organisations, including Cisco Systems, Motorola, Qantas and several others by drawing on a field study conducted by the writer dur-ing 2003–2004. It attempts to identify some key emerging trends and practices in the field, and lessons that can be learnt from the experiences of organisations reviewed, for the successful deployment of e-learning strategies. Key Words: e-learning, learning and content management systems, Australia and Asia Pacific jel Classification: m53, o3