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Corporate Training Failing to Meet The Needs of 21st Century Businesses

Corporate training will fail to meet the needs of 21st century businesses unless it catches up with rapid development opportunities in online learning, the Head of an award-winning learning technology team has warned.

Many business trainers are behind the times in their knowledge and awareness of advances such as the use of virtual worlds like Second Life in education and how these can help meet the training needs of public and private organisations.

Gilly Salmon, who leads the University of Leicester's Beyond Distance Research Alliance, says that while schools, colleges and universities are increasingly tapping into the most up-to-date technology to develop new ways of learning, many corporate trainers remain unaware of the new resources available to them - and this is costing them time and money, as well as frustrating employees.

"I think they are missing huge opportunities at the moment," she says. "It's a tragedy when someone from the corporate training world comes in and talks to me about what is going on in e-learning and then says, 'I wish I'd known about all this five years ago.'"

She has called on business trainers to start talking to university e-learning teams so that they can learn from each other, with business representatives becoming associates or as research partners. This would lead researchers to a better understanding of corporate training needs, and give trainers early notice of the latest technological developments.

Professor Salmon's team uses the virtual world Second Life to build a virtual oil rig for health and safety training. It allows students to role play in a safe environment and costs only around £1,000 a year to run. "I would have thought there would have been a huge application for something like that across the corporate training world," she said.

The way people learn is changing rapidly, and it is no longer possible for trainers to draw on their own experiences of learning to inform the way they pass on new knowledge, she added.

Companies can spend millions of pounds setting up e-learning courses that fail to achieve their objectives because they are inappropriately designed, says Salmon.

"What tends to happen in corporate training is people set targets for x number of courses to be online whereas they should look at what kind of learning works with what kind of technology."

Professor Salmon's Beyond Distance Research Alliance won the Association for Learning Technology's Learning Technologist of the Year Team award this month (SEPT) jointly with a team from Nottingham University.

The Leicester team was praised for its outstanding research-based contribution to the field of learning technology and for influencing the growing use of this technology at the university, while remaining committed to working with wide external partnerships. Professor Salmon also this month accepted a UNIQUe award on behalf of the University from the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning. This is a new quality mark that recognises European universities for their innovative use of ICT.