Managing: It's Time To Learn Now: Just, Boot It Up

MANAGING
It's Time To Learn Now:
Just, Boot It Up

There's an enterprise-angle to e-learning too, one that puts the edge on corporate training programmes while keeping costs down. Now, that's a tune companies love to hear.

By Vinod Mahanta & Aparna Ramalingam

Anoop Dwivedi is a 30-year-old code jock at Delhi-based software development company, HCL Perot. For the past three months, he had been posted in an European capital city, working nine-hours-a-day onsite at a leading bank major. It isn't just work and play that takes up Dwivedi's time; every day he logs on to www.learnatsatyam.com, an online B2C and B2B learning site using a password provided by his company's Competency Development Centre (CDC), to learn all about XSL. ''The e-learning initiative has helped us enhance our knowledge and competence in the latest technologies with immediate results,'' says Padmaja Krishnan, Vice-President (Corporate Planning & Strategic Initiatives), HCL Perot.

Welcome to e-learning in its latest avatar: like other e-terms, the emphasis is now on the enterprise. For the largest e-learning programmes in the world aren't run by companies like Element K and SmartForce; they are offered in-house by GE, Cisco, Citibank, Hewlett-Packard, and hundreds of other companies around the world. Closer home, Bharti Cellular, Wipro, Infosys, HCL-Perot, and Maruti Udyog do.

Infosys introduced its first intranet-based training programme in 1995; in 1997 it created a virtual classroom where two courses were offered; and in late 2000 it initiated a programme, called Technology Assisted Learning (TAL). ''Now on,'' says V.P. Kochikar, who heads the company's education and research function, ''8 per cent of entry level software professionals, and 20 per cent of middle-level ones, will learn online.'' Bharti Cellular boasts a separate e-learning facility at its office at Okhla, a Delhi suburb. The company's 550 employees can choose from a range of programmes-technical and management-related-on offer from Smart Force, a Redwood, California-based e-learning major. And apart from offering several training programmes online, Wipro provides its employees with online mentors who guide them through difficult stretches of coursework.

Back To School, Virtually

If you think it is only infotech and telecom companies that are moving to the new-e version of training, perish the thought: old world worthies like Citibank, Apollo, and LG too are. But it is the infotech companies that are, predictably, at the vanguard. ''Training is a critical raw material in this industry,'' says Sudip Banerjee, Chief Executive (Staffing & Operations), Wipro. ''The facility to manage the diversity of technology is greatest in an online environment,'' adds Kochikar of Infosys.

There are other benefits, though, that will appeal to non-tech companies: e-learning is an interactive process and requires the active participation of learners; it need not be limited by real world constraints of geographies, space, and time; and it is scalable, with the incremental costs of this scalability being insignificant. With several companies waking up to these benefits, the International Data Corporation expects the web-based corporate learning market to grow to about $11.4 billion in size by 2003. The potential, to resort to a cliché, is bigger: American companies spent $62.5 billion last year training their employees.

Companies that aren't convinced by any of these arguments need to just consider the cost perspective. The cost of travel, board, and food account for a substantial chunk of most training budgets. The country's largest car maker, Maruti Udyog used to train its service engineers by getting them to travel to Delhi where they would spend 10 days learning about the parts and their functions and also gather some on-the-job experience by actually servicing cars. Today, courtesy an e-learning programme created for the company by VisualSoft, the engineers complete the first part online from wherever they are, then travel to Delhi for a shorter, four-day, on-the-job induction. The saving? An impressive 45 per cent a year. Trainers, too, don't come cheap, and e-learning often renders them irrelevant.

The cost involved in creating an e-learning facility-essentially the hardware and licences from the creators of e-learning programmes-could vary from Rs 50,000 to half a crore, but it is definitely higher than the cost involved in creating a traditional training facility.

''But when the operating costs are compared, e-learning is certainly more cost effective; it could cost just a sixth of what traditional classroom training does,'' says Pritha Chatterjee, Vice-President (HR) at Bharti Cellular.

Can everything be e-learned? ''The medium is perfect for skill-and knowledge-based courses,'' says Anil Sachdev, the chief executive of talent development company Growlatent.com. ''But when it comes to intangible stuff like motivational training... That's where the challenge lies for technology.''

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