E-Learning brings world-class training right to your desktop (page 4 of 4)

Post-Enron, corporate governance goes beyond making a legitimate profit, and is much more about making sure the whole organisation operates according to the highest qualitative and quantitative standards.

The area where e-learning can make the most effective contribution to good corporate governance is in ethics and compliance training. Companies and public sector organisations alike can mitigate risk of regulatory non-compliance by simply reminding employees of the industry rules and regulations to which they are bound.

This seems obvious, but an Internet search quickly reveals that many breaches of compliance across a wide variety of industries are due to insufficient staff training. To give just one example, the 2001 Julius Report about Banking Code compliance found that 53% of the UK banks assessed had weak training and competence in this area.

The reason is that industry codes of conduct tend to be communicated to employees at their induction, when they are new to the job environment and need to take in a lot of different information on the same day.

Subsequent refreshers are often sporadic and outdated. Considering the pace at which the regulatory environment shifts in some industries, more frequent training would undoubtedly help to reduce the number of compliance breaches.

Perhaps even more at risk of neglect is ethical training. Most companies have a code of ethics written down somewhere, but whether that code is communicated or enforced is an entirely different matter. Writing in the Kansas City Journal, corporate compliance expert Arthur Chaykin observed that even "Enron...had a perfectly good code of ethics. However, no one was responsible for enforcing it, advocating it or serving as a clearing house for issues arising under it."

The problem, of course, is that companies do not have unlimited funds for employee training, and when training is not directly related to increasing profitability, it is often regarded as "nice-to-have" rather than essential.

E-learning is a highly suitable solution to this dilemma. According to the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative, when compared to traditional instructor-led courses, e-learning can reduce training costs by 30-60 per cent and cut the time needed for instruction by 20-40 per cent.

For example, last year Oracle delivered an internal ethics training course and examination simultaneously to more than 42,000 employees around the world, using its own Oracle Learning Management software. The software allowed all staff to take the course and the test in 30 minutes while seated at their desks, ensuring minimum disruption to the working day.

The training was rolled out at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time that a classroom-based course would have taken. Perhaps most importantly, because the software is linked to Oracle's overall Human Resources Management System, HR managers were able to track the results of the test in real time and watch out for any serious knowledge gaps.

Results and benefits like these are helping HR professionals to move e-learning out of the "IT ghetto", where it has been used almost exclusively by information technology workers to learn new computer programming skills or take online certification courses, and into the wider organisation.

"Oracle Learning Management was built from the ground up to provide both mid-sized and large companies and public-sector organisations with a complete learning management system that supports the full range of activities associated with training and development," said Joel Summers, senior vice president of Global HRMS and Learning Management Product Development at Oracle.

"Coupled with Thomson NETg's library, companies can now provide employees with world-class learning programs that are easy to deploy, targeted to job roles and aligned with organisational goals."