The end of the year is usually the time that employees will ponder about career options and sometimes, the result is, they resign by the start of the year… right about now. You are left with a gap in trained or skilled workforce, and you need to get existing staff to fill the gap or hire someone quickly. Either way, they need to be trained pronto.

When this becomes an annual occurrence with a critical mass to train each year, you may decide to invest in e-learning as a skills-gap-closing solution, rushing to engage an e-learning company to do the magic of bringing staff up to speed.

What employers may fail to see, is that e-learning is not just a matter of financial investment; many more areas of investment are needed if you are to embark on e-learning for your company. The following are just some of the areas that requires consideration.

1. Training materials

These are materials that have been carefully curated to meet the intended learning objectives, which in turn meets your company’s business objectives. The following are NOT training materials:

• Company manuals
• Presentation slides containing diagrams without elaboration, or unsubstantiated bulleted points

Due diligence to curate training content, if they are not yet in existence, is necessary if you are looking to successfully train your staff.

2. Dedicated expert for reviewing e-learning solutions

There is a reason pharmacists exist, not just doctors. Doctors will diagnose our condition, then, relay our prescription needs for pharmacists, the drugs specialists, to verify that a prescription is appropriate and accurate given our condition, before the drugs are administered to us.

In a way, e-learning solutions providers are like doctors – we will analyse the learning gap (the problem) vis-à-vis the training content (the existing remedy) and design a solution (replacing or levelling up on the existing remedy). But we need Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) (the pharmacists) – to provide the training content (the medicine cabinet) for us to work together to validate the solution (our designs and recommendations), ensuring it closes the learning gap (cures the condition).

In short, companies looking to embark on e-learning must also appoint SME(s), externally or internally; if the latter, the companies are to ensure this assignment is factored into their base workloads.

3. IT administration

The e-learning solution, often in the form of an IT package, once ready, needs to be hosted on a learning management system (LMS). If a provider is not engaged to host the package, it should go without saying that an internal technical team is required to test the package and ensure that it is compatible with their in-house LMS before the package can be deployed and staff can begin their e-learning.

The lack of an internal technical team may potentially render the whole e-learning solutions development effort useless.

4. Maintenance and updates

Every investment requires maintenance. Rarely is training content evergreen; those involving policies, in particular, have an expiration date and their e-learning solutions needs updated to remain relevant and uphold accuracy. Even if textual content is still intact, visual representations may have changed, such as changes in staff uniform or corporate logo.

With this in mind, companies embarking on e-learning must be prepared for content updates and its incidentals, such as voice-over and graphics/animation changes.