 by Rick Levine
You start your computer. You launch Internet Explorer and go to your company’s Web site or Intranet. After entering your personal login and password, a list of recommended classes is displayed. Apparently, the national sales manager (your boss) has checked off a few more things he wants you to learn. You scan the list of required courses:
2002 Uniform Specifications for ACME Airlines
Direct Embroidery: Advanced Technology Today
How To Sell Outerwear All Year Long
e-Learning 101: The Uniform Industry
Each link on the list launches a 20-45 minute, interactive Web-based class. And the system tracks all your activity and lets your boss know when you have started and/or completed each class. You click on the last one on the list.
Words suddenly fly around the screen. Exciting music swells. And a recorded narrator begins to speak.
Narrator: If I told you that your customers will purchase more apparel, and of higher quality, after your sales representative takes the time to teach buyers about the amazing superiority of your product, what would you would say?
A multiple choice list appear with four choices: (a) true, (b) false, (c) don’t know, (d) don’t care. You laugh at the last choice and then select “true.”
Narrator: Right. And if I reminded you that it takes considerable management, effort, time and expense to train that sales representative to perform at the level of expertise you desire, how would you respond?
Choices: (a) agree, (b) disagree, (c) don’t know, (d) not my department
You select the last one, just to be funny. And you know the appropriate narrated response is programmed to play based on your selection so you wait to hear how the instructor wrote the script.
Narrator: Ha-ha, are you going to select all the funny ones? Seriously, what if I told you that these sales representatives could be trained without taking valuable time away from your management team or losing opportunities due to seasoned sales representatives having to get off the phone to train these new hires? What if your outside sales force — people working all over your territory, state or the country — could learn, in detail, how to sell a new product line without traveling to the home office for training? Or what if this sales force must not always be sent reams of printed materials every time the particulars of a uniform program change? And, best of all, what if you had a mechanism to track the ongoing education and training progress of each of these sales representatives as they learn from a distance — in a hotel room, at their regional office, absorbing the material at their own pace? What would you say to all that?
And so the course titled “e-Learning 101: The Uniform Industry” continues, teaching you in an entertaining, engaging and efficient manner.
This is an example of the user experience, and the great promise, of a growing phenomenon in training called e-Learning, the practice of educating employees by loading interactive training materials on the Internet. This may be publicly available material on your company’s Web site or proprietary material accessible only to those people with login privileges on your company Intranet (private, “company use only” Web sites), which many employers use today. According to an InformationWeek research survey of 500 large companies, 25 percent of their employees have completed off-the-shelf e-Learning courses, while 35 percent have completed company-customized e-Learning courses.
The applications for e-Learning are vast. Users can learn new computer systems or programs; new employees discover how the company is structured and what the employee benefit programs offer; complete career development courses that teach time management, accounting principles and sales techniques; or gain knowledge about potential legal issues such as diversity training and sexual harassment. For this last one, the employee benefits from the knowledge and the company benefits by engaging cost-effective protection from litigation by providing awareness training.
The National Safety Council has offered safety training for decades. The organization now offers a series of Web-based solutions that enable safety managers to train, test and track one or thousands of users right from their desktops. Current offerings include courses related to workplace safety, first aid/CPR and defensive driving.
e-Learning technology service providers also offer a range of supporting applications. Courses as well as students are tracked using a Learning Management System (LMS), the functionality of which will guide students, instructors (content providers) and management. Built-in reporting features will allow an organization to see who has completed what training.
To put this in a uniform industry context, imagine there are changes to the items included in a large uniform program for a national company. There may be over 100 people, perhaps 500, that may need to be “educated” or re-trained in the specifications for this program; who-wears-what-when. An LMS would allow the uniform supplier to build a course on the subject anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour long, distribute a message to all who need to know and then keep track of who has come to the Web site and completed the training.
“I believe this is similar to the experience businesses had when they first began purchasing computers,” says Ernie Jackson, director of communications for the NAUMD. “There were so many ways to use the machines, it took companies years to adopt certain applications. The use of the Internet as a delivery mechanism for training is a great idea. Now companies just need to make it work within their organizations.”
While the uses of e-Learning are many, perhaps the best potential return-on-investment (ROI) is the use of Web-based classes as a tool for sales training. After all, the bread and butter of any successful uniform manufacturer, dealer or distributor is the ability to place a knowledgeable sales representative in front of a buyer (and then, of course, backing up the sale with superior customer service, portions of which pundits say also can be taught online).
While not a member of the uniform industry, the well-known manufacturer Black & Decker makes a compelling case for using e-Learning sales solutions. “Our sales force can’t come in for three-day conferences anymore,” said Matt DeFeo, vice president of recruiting and training at Black & Decker Corp., in the November 2001 issue of informationweek.com. But these sales representatives still need to understand all the new products and features. So Black & Decker offers an online course that uses a learning and content management system and now expects to save more than $100,000 annually in travel expenses alone. The real kicker is that sales force spends more time in front of customers. “With online learning, we expect to have our 700 sales folks with customers 12,000 more days a year,” says DeFeo.
The time-savings that e-Learning offers is not based solely on reduced travel. A number of studies have concluded that a well designed Web-based course that allows trainees to direct their own learning (skipping over sections they have already mastered and focusing on areas of difficulty) can reduce the training between 25-60 percent of an equivalent instructor-led course. In this case, gained productivity can be measured by multiplying the average daily cost of trainees by the reduction in training time by the number of trainees in the course.
An interesting application of e-Learning is being drafted right now at King Louie, a supplier of sportswear and apparel to the uniform industry. Roger Carroll, director of marketing for the Grandview, Mo.-based manufacturer says, “We are developing a Web-based course which will be a primer on the process of making custom hats. This educational tool will serve at first as indoctrination for the customer. The goal is to help buyers understand better the decision factors on what is needed to make a hat — fabric choices, visor considerations, etc. Our strategy is to help people feel less intimidated with this whole process by becoming better educated. A second benefit to King Louie is having our sales people take the course, creating and reinforcing their own knowledge as well. Our independent reps will know more about the technology and King Louie’s custom hat process.”
But measuring the value of e-Learning is not a simple task. Hundreds of factors can impact the results — whether dealing with performance or cost issues. Moreover, e-Learning is not the answer to all training needs. In many cases, alternate delivery options may provide a more effective and economical alternative.
The biggest challenge the e-Learning industry faces may be the mind-set that says learning is done best in a classroom with a teacher standing in front of students.
On the chart below are some comparisons being drawn in this ongoing debate among training experts — as described in T&D [training and development] Magazine.
Most smart organizational training directors are approaching their programs as blended solutions — part led, part computer-based training.
Make no mistake though; If an ROI can be established for using any type of technology-based training (CD-ROM, Internet, etc.), there is an interest at small and large corporations alike. According to the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), annual spending on training has swelled to $65 billion, as companies — until the downturn, at least — had been putting 1.8 percent of payroll costs into training.
The adoption of e-Learning solutions is also predicted to rise sharply. According to estimates from International Data Corporation (IDC), the worldwide e-Learning market will grow from $2.2 billion in 2000 to $18.5 billion by 2005. “In the economy we are in now, there will not be the same investment in technology, but we are demanding of employees greater productivity. In order to achieve that you need to give employees internal tools to make them work smarter,” says Cushing Anderson, program manager for learning services research at IDC. “If you invest in the worker’s skill set overall, you should be able to see a change in productivity.”
At the end of the final lesson, a brief exam pops up on your screen. This is where an assessment can be made as to how much knowledge you have retained from the course.
Narrator: What is the definition of e-Learning?
Several choices pop up, and you select one.
Narrator: How would you apply these solutions, in theory, to the benefit of the sales force of a mid-sized or large uniform manufacturer, dealer or distributor to encourage smarter, more productive representatives?
A series of options come up, and you fill in the blanks with some of your brilliant thoughts.
Narrator: Of course, it will still take considerable management, effort, time and expense to set up an e-Learning environment to train sales representatives to perform at the level of expertise you desire.
But, once deployed, an e-Learning solution offers a way to pull it all together. The technology is available today. The question is how and when the uniform industry will embrace e-Learning as a tool in its training arsenal.
Words and pictures fly around. The music swells and then fades away.
Rick Levine is the publisher of Made To Measure and a principal in its sister company, xBx Channel Media, a technology firm specializing in Web development and e-Learning.
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