Monthly Archives: December 2009

Needs must – when PwC drives

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A report of the Learning 2009 event in Florida, USA – freely available from www.learninglight.com – written by a team of UK learning technology specialists, including Learning Light’s David Patterson, along with UKTI’s Nigel Goddard, Assessment 21’s Gerard Lennox and Sean Gilligan of Webanywhere, outlines a presentation given by Sarah Lindsell, Andrew Wolff and Helen Gibson, of PwC.

 

Apparently – in order to cut the costs of learning and development delivery – PwC elected to deliver 80% of its learning and training virtually. This has meant the PwC team delivering 1.5m hours of e-learning, having 70,000 virtual classroom participants, replicating 7,000 events and delivering four huge virtual conferences. The four virtual conferences have involved some 4,000 delegates – and the challenge to the PwC team was to reduce the costs of all this learning by between 30% and 40%.

 

Lindsell, Wolff and Gibson reported that the PwC uptake of e-learning as a delivery method is now at 80%. However, PwC recognises that this was born out of economic necessity, and is probably too high a percentage.

 

Interestingly, though, PwC now requires an ROI case to be done by the business for courses being delivered in a non virtual/e-learning environment. So it looks certain that PwC will never again deliver between 70% and 80% of its learning and development activities via classrooms.

 

Comment: Of course, needs must when the Devil – or in this case, PwC – drives, as the saying goes. It’s all very well to justify e-learning purely in terms of cost savings on the balance sheet in the short term – but there are other issues to take into consideration in the longer term. These include the effectiveness of using ‘pure e-learning’ to impart ‘soft’ skills; the adverse effects on building networks through not meeting people face-to-face, the abilities of the e-learning materials to adapt to each learner’s particular learning needs/ learning context, and so on.

 

It’s nice to know that e-learning can have a significant positive effect on a balance sheet and, so, can force accountants to take notice of it. As with the rest of life, reducing everything to figures does not tell the whole story. Some things are too important to be trusted to those who merely run our organisations.

Too many cooks…

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The current crisis of confidence in UK management may have been fuelled by an over quota of ‘technical specialists’ filling managerial roles who lack the necessary leadership and management skills to keep staff engaged, according to a performance culture specialist from Q4 Solutions. Following the recent CBI report which revealed many employees had little confidence in their managers, Nigel Watson, of Q4 Solutions, voiced concerns that the UK’s long history of organisations ducking difficult performance issues and ‘sideways promoting’ staff instead of performance managing problem staff out of the organisation could be to blame.

He claims that management teams within businesses are suffering from a hangover of ‘technical specialists’, whose technical competence needed rewarding to entice them to stay – but that meant they were promoted into a managerial position for which they were untrained and unsuited. According to Watson, things could improve if organisations focused on innovative ways to manage talent, including working towards a performance- (not power-) led culture.

 

Comment: There seems to have been a rather unfortunate outbreak of reality here. Hopefully, after a few weeks off for the Christmas and New Year break, everyone will have forgotten about this – and then organisations and their management teams won’t have to grasp this rather tricky nettle. Of course, the performance of ‘UK plc’ won’t improve but, while their organisations exist, many people who don’t deserve them will pocket some handsome salaries.

Learning Light’s e-learning optimism

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A report on the UK e-learning sector in 2009 – ‘The UK e-learning market 2009’ – published this month by Learning Light, the Sheffield-based centre of excellence in the use of e-learning and learning technologies in the workplace, paints an optimistic picture: stating that the sector is ‘flowering’ despite the recession. The report’s principal finding is that the UK e-learning industry remains ‘robustly positive in its view of the market and the prospect for continuing growth’. Using financial modeling and third party research, the report suggests that the annual size of the UK e-learning industry is currently between £300m and £450m; with growth rates forecast of between 6.7% and 8% for 2010.

 

“Our view is based not just on more companies using e-learning and learning technologies but also on such factors as marketing departments commissioning learning materials to support customers,” commented David Patterson one of the report’s three authors. “Another key factor is the adeptness with which the UK e-learning industry is adopting and exploiting new media for delivering learning, such as gaming and immersive learning scenarios, leading to the eventual contextualisation and personalisation of learning being promoted by companies such as the LCMS producer, Giunti Labs.”

 

The report acknowledges that the current recession has resulted in downward price pressure on developers and vendors; while cuts in training budgets and public sector projects have also had an adverse effect. Nonetheless, Patterson and his co-authors – Glyn Jung and Gillian Broadhead – remain optimistic that the UK’s e-learning industry, concentrated in its two principal hubs around Sheffield and Brighton, is set fair to weather the economic downturn.

 

“There is no doubt that companies will come and go – just as they did in the easier times,” said Gillian Broadhead. “We can only reflect the optimism and confidence, the innovation and enthusiasm that characterised our research findings.”

 

In passing, the Learning Light report mentions that the UK e-learning market, along with the e-learning market in Scandinavia, is one of the most mature e-learning markets in Europe. Patterson said: “We believe the Scandinavian market to be worth some €1bn – compared with the UK’s €650m to €700m. The Scandinavian market is forecast to grow at eight per cent over the next year – a figure which could also be attributed to the UK market. The next largest market in Europe is that of France – but this is predicted to grow in the next year by some 15% to between €300m to €350m. An aggregate of the UK, Scandinavian and French e-learning markets accounts for some 80% of the total European market.”

 

Comment: This report began as an update on the report (available from Learning Light’s e-Learning Centre website, www.e-learningcentre.co.uk) written by John Helmer, on behalf of Learning Light, in 2007. Whatever you think about the accuracy – or otherwise – of Learning Light’s figures, at the very least this report is a serious attempt at quantifying the UK’s e-learning sector. It’s the most comprehensive set of figures that anyone has – and their real value will be seen in the future, providing ‘base figures’ for comparison with contemporary findings.

 

‘The UK e-learning market 2009’ report is available, as a free download, from http://www.creativesheffield.co.uk/