If you want to have a content and productive workforce that will help your company make it in this ever-evolving and very competitive capitalism-oriented business world, their education is one of the first things you should invest in. An uneducated workforce is an incompetent workforce, and this is one of the quickest ways to ensure your company doesn’t make it very far.

Unfortunately, putting together a good, coherent and effective training program is sometimes very difficult, especially when it comes to big companies with hundreds, perhaps even thousands of employees. There’s a lot of time management and organization involved, and even when everything goes perfectly you can’t possibly predict how your employees handled the training and whether they’ve learned enough to be good at their jobs – at which point comes the testing, and the evaluation of the tests.

This is a complicated process, and the more complicated it gets, the more money it will cost the company in the long run. One of the solutions for this problem, for many companies, was switching their training programs over to some kind of eLearning platform.

The IBM Case

The IBM (short for International Business Machines) Corporation is an American technology company that’s been around since 1911, and today it operates in more than 150 countries worldwide. Needless to say that, due to its immense popularity and success, the sheer number of people employed in IBM is quite massive, nowadays coming quite close to 400,000.

With such a large number of workers, you can imagine how complicated it must be to put a training program into practice, both for new and existing employees. However, this didn’t stop IBM from focusing quite extensively on the development of their workforce, even during periods of financial uncertainty, and in 2002 the company was ranked fourth on Training magazine’s “The Training Top 100” list, based on their commitment towards employee training.

This placement was well deserved, as the company had reported spending close to $1 billion on employee training in the mid-1990’s alone. In order to attempt to cut costs, towards the end of the twentieth century the company decided to try and incorporate eLearning for further employee training. The system was initially intended to be used to train IBM’s newly recruited managers.

In the year following the implementation of eLearning, the company had reported saving more than $160 million dollars. This is a massive amount of money for such a company considering the time period, and it’s all because of the unique way in which eLearning can help your training efforts. A year later, that same figure rose to $350 million, and the director of IBM Mindspan Solutions Andrew Sandler had explained that not only had the implementation saved the company a large amount of money, but that it had also delivered a far more effective training, providing employees with “five times more content than before”.

How eLearning Saves Money

Alright, so we know that eLearning can help you save a great deal of money on constructing and putting your company’s various training programs into practice, as well as increase their effectiveness, but how exactly does this happen? What are the actual advantages of using eLearning in place of conventional training and testing methods?

First of all, let’s talk about the ways in which it can help you save money. eLearning saves on printing costs, since everything is accomplished with the help of a computer. This means that the company doesn’t have to print learning materials such as books or pamphlets, and at the end of the training, testing material. This might seem like a menial expense when you have a small company, but when you’re IBM it makes a significant difference. Additionally, by using good knowledge testing software, these days you have access to automatic test evaluation, meaning that you don’t have to have a bunch of people tasked with just grading tests, which takes a considerable amount of time – and as we all know, time is money.

And finally, eLearning means that educators are given a much greater amount of flexibility when it comes to conducting lessons because they don’t have to be in the same physical space as the students. These days all you have to do is open up a live stream and have people connect to it, and you can conduct the lesson just as effectively, but with a much larger group of people – therefore increasing effectiveness even further.

GetCertified: Next Level Employee Training

To implement eLearning in your company, you’re going to need a piece of good software that will be able to fulfill all your training-based needs. GetCertified is a bundle software that allows you to quickly and efficiently create various types of training programs. One of the greatest advantages of this approach is that GetCertified actually supports all kinds of multimedia that can serve as learning material – video, audio, pictures, text, Google Docs, YouTube links, the list goes on.

This can greatly enhance the entire learning experience, make your employees more focused on the program and make it easier for them to master it, ultimately leading to a far more productive and educated workforce.

What this software will also give you is an easy way to organize, analyze and gather information from various test results, and this is essential if you want to go about improving your training program in the future.

Summary

As you can see from a very concrete example, eLearning has quite a number of benefits in comparison to the conventional methods of employee training. It can save your company a lot of money, and the bigger your company is, the more you’ll be able to use eLearning to maximize efficiency and increase profit. The education of your workforce is the one place where you should never skimp, but it’s also important that you invest wisely and in a system that you know will benefit both you and your workers. eLearning is slowly becoming the future, and the sooner your company transitions to the idea, the sooner you’ll be able to reap all the benefits that it can provide.