Companies are Using Technology to Communicate

No one who wants to add value to their business can afford to neglect their investment in human capital. Increasingly, companies are using new technology to deliver training to their staff, to refresh their existing skills and develop new ones.

Companies now want to be able to manage their learning and link it to performance management and the talent management of the company itself, so they are not just providing learning for the current need but they are building their workforce for their business needs of tomorrow. They are providing them with those skills and the competence that they require so that the business can be successful three or four years from now, not just providing them with the top courses that meet the needs of today. Internet communication does not need to be the solitary activity some perceive it to be. When it first started, it was said that you could save on travel costs and on lodging costs.

That is why content was provided online, just as static content, you can go in and browse and learn by yourself. But using that same concept, you can have something like live learning where a trainer is situated in one country and the learner is situated in another part of the world, and they can come together at one particular time online to collaborate and learn with each other.

Learning from a static program is just one thing. You cannot interact enough with it. You need to have the additional support of a trainer to respond to those interactions, if you have questions, or want to be able to provide a comment or provide an input to someone else's question. The collaboration aspect is also useful when many users need to learn the same thing at the same time. These tools have actually expanded that capability from just chatting to include other capabilities like application sharing.

Say a company wants to roll out a new application and they want to be able to train all of these people at the same time. They can share that application, so a learner in Saudi Arabia, for example, can take control of an application that is being run from a PC in Dubai, and learn with it, and be able to ask questions and interact. Countries where voice over IP is in use can also utilize it as a means for users to interact.

Businesses can take measures to ensure that the shared learning experience stays focused and does not become entirely social. All of this is also able to be controlled by the trainer so it doesn't become too much of a social collaboration, but just a learning collaboration. The trainer still has a controlling capability so if it goes off learning they're able to bring them all back.

She believes that technology is accepted as a delivery medium for learning and that learners are happy to use it. IT skills development is beginning to decline because people now come with very good IT skills. That is taken for granted. You do not really need to be trained in any of these applications, unless of course there's a major change in an application like with Windows Vista, then there might be a new training need that develops.

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