eLearning is primarily renowned as an indispensable tool for a company’s overall competency and continues to take on a growing role in the companies’ training programs. In addition, in cases of projects requiring multiple competencies, companies must consider certain issues in drawing the most from an e-learning platform. Essentially, the advantages of online training programs on their own cannot guarantee the success of a company’s eLearning project. The question then becomes: how to successfully integrate e-learning into your training process?

In order to integrate e-learning into your training program offering you must first:

– Prioritize a mindset of investment over one of strictly consuming on the part of training programs time-wise,

– Reflect on possible ways of having a complementary link between on-site and remote training,

– Prioritize individual training programs at first in order to evaluate its results.

Once these factors have been taken into account, it is advised to then pay particular attention to several points. Firstly, paving the way to a successful integration of an e-learning platform within a training program is intrinsically linked to managing change and the quality of available tools. To that end, the capacity for co-operation and collaboration on the part of all concerned services is essential, most notably those of human resources and training. At stake is the appropriation by users and is necessary for managers to give weight and legitimacy to the project.

A crucial step in this process goes back to the importance of promoting e-learning as a critical tool which collaborators must understand the reasoning behind its creation and how they can readily access it. An e-learning mechanism must be equipped with a communications plan which will leverage the chosen theme and support its innovative nature.

While creating, developing and deploying innovative training content is important, it must also ideally have the ability to be delivered in complete autonomy. The training mechanism will not be perceived as credible by users if all content isn’t up to date. For this to be possible, the maintenance of e-learning modules must be taken into account in the creation phase.

Finally, a culture shift is a huge factor in a successful integration of eLearning into a training mechanism. It is critical to the process of training staff in the fundamentals of the digital culture (social networks, RSS feeds, instant messaging, cloud, etc.). The main objective is to instill a common vocabulary and joint vision of the usage guidelines of the company while also avoiding a digital fracture from occurring.

To sum up, many organizations are looking for the best way to take the first steps into online training techniques. Such organizations will surely have to rethink their overall culture in order to draw the most benefit from these new available tools. Strong communication will foster the curiosity of trainees and will spark an interest to be initiated into the eLearning process with a clear goal in mind.

Caroline Irrmann, web editor