Four pillars for the future

HEADNOTE

Games and simulations, performance support, measuring e-learning effectively, and how to implementing e-learning throughout large organisations are all challenges for corporates.

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This year's

Tata Interactive Learning Forum (TLF) - one of an on-going series of TLFs being held in the US, UK and Australia - examined four topics which, in the words of TLF delegate and independent market analyst, David Wilson, of Elearnity: "Challenge corporate assumptions on how learning and e-learning will be delivered in the future."

Simulation-based learning is gaining popularity allowing learners to understand concepts, apply them under controlled conditions where the cost of failure is low and then apply them in real life. Moreover, said keynote speaker, Christiane Zimmer, of Zimmer and Partner, one of Germany's top business simulations specialists: "Simulations allow sustainable decision training in realistic circumstances - with cause and effect being displayed 'right before the learners' eyes', which helps to make the learning memorable."

Zimmer has spent the last 16 years developing and running management training through simulations - using TOPSIM, one of Germany's leading business simulations. In that time, she has worked with companies including BASF chemicals, Bosch and Siemens.

"Principally, simulations develop business competence and support the roll-out of new concepts, such as 'value-based management'," she said. "Significantly, we find that, after about an hour of playing the TOPSIM simulation, participants forget that they are playing a 'game' and begin behaving as if this is the 'real world'."

Terry Lehmann, director of training and development at the Texas-based oil services giant Baker Hughes, explained how Baker Hughes has adopted a strategy to disseminate its core values of integrity, performance, teamwork and learning to all its 28,000 or so employees in 90 countries across the world. He commented: "Learning is not a 'soft issue'. It's a priority at every point in the business cycle in order to create and sustain competitive advantage."

Lehmann's fellow American, Gary Dickelman, argued that performance support programmes contribute most value to organisations in the fields of customer-facing, knowledge-intensive activities; providing workgroup support for tools that require mastery in order to produce optimal job performance, and retrieving and managing "organisational memory".

Dickelman is president of EPSScentral LLC, based in Annandale, Virginia, and a teacher at George Mason and Boise State Universities' Graduate School of Education and Engineering. He provided evidence to show that performance-centred solutions result in:

* Workers coming to competency in minutes or hours instead of days and weeks.

* Error and omission rates of no more than one per cent - reduced from 35 per cent or more.

* Eliminating as much as 80 per cent of training and e-learning activities, including time taken on these activities' development, deployment and maintenance.

* A return on investment in terms of millions of dollars.

"Studies show that between 46 and 70 per cent of tasks or activities can be supported with embedded, real-time workflow-based performance-centred interventions," he said. "Many organisations mis-apply performance principles by addressing low-risk or very high-risk tasks - thus missing the real opportunities to make a difference."

The final keynote speaker was Charles Jennings, head of global learning at Reuters. Discussing measuring e-learning's organisational value, he observed that business managers don't really care about the quality of training in their organisation nor should they because learning and training are "inputs", while performance is the key "output".

"However", he said, "these managers care about the strategic role of the learning function to support them - in terms of employee and business performance."

Jennings went on to consider three measures of learning "success":

* The number of training days or hours of e-learning that are delivered - dismissing it as a "useless measure of input".

* The return on investment - and commented that it is useful but often difficult to calculate and, in any case, it is a time-consuming exercise.

* Cost savings - a simple measure that gets the attention of the chief financial officer.

"Cost savings have a place in measuring the value of learning but this is only one element of the whole sum," he said.

"The value of learning in an organisation is not just about cost savings but about building performance. To be successful, a learning programme has to be shown to have contributed to the overall business benefit - and this will involve using a mix of metrics, along with a 'warm, fuzzy feeling' that 'learning is good', that will impress the CEO."