There's more to selling sports equipment than meets the eye, according to Scott Ford, training manager for retailer Rebel Sport. Not only do the shop assistants have to be well-versed in sports ranging from curling to ping-pong, they also need to display all of the customer management skills common to a retail position.

Faced with training a constant flow of retail staff in such a diversity of talents, Ford opted for online learning approximately two years ago, and while retail is not an environment traditionally associated with e-learning, the company has had some notable successes.

"I think any industry can benefit from e-learning if it is done correctly," Ford says. "We used to have a two day, face-to-face training program which can now be done in a single day. If people can come prepared for their training session by doing the online training first, it heightens what they get out of the face-to-face session."

The Rebel University consists of 12 interactive modules ranging from point-of-sale training to specific sports modules and management training, and the results speak for themselves.

"The stores where the staff use Rebel Uni the most are the ones that have the best growth," Ford says. "It has already paid for itself in terms on initial outlay and realistically most of the work now involves updating the modules so costs are minimal."

However, Ford urges caution, pointing out that the success of an e-learning offering depends largely on how it is managed and implemented.

"Companies that do it (e-learning) poorly don't start with the end users. You really need to start with the person on the shop floor and find out what they want and need," Ford says. "Before we write a module we go to the people who work in the departments and find out what questions they are being asked by customers. There is no point teaching them information they won't be using on the shop floor."

The appropriateness of teaching material seems to be of concern at all levels of implementation with Peter Tilton, head of online learning services at the ANZ bank, saying that many organisations fail to implement effective e-learning because they do take time to properly define their strategy.

"The biggest mistake companies make is seeing it as a software purchase and buying a huge suite of IT courseware which leads to a large spend with little utilisation," Tilton says. "We began by trying to identify our core business problems and drivers over the next 12 to 18 months, and focus the training on those areas."

Using Oracle's ASP style e-learning service and working in conjunction with various courseware developers and content developers, ANZ has conducted 158000 courses for 23000 staff and a raft of contractors over the last 18 months.

"The ASP model provides a much more affordable entry point and tangible ROI within the first few months, which in turn has generated a lot of interest," Tilton says.

In fact, e-learning at ANZ has been so successful the bank has commercialised the offering and is actively selling third party training into the corporate market.

From the users point of view, Tilton says ANZ employees and contractors have responded well to online training, especially to the level of control they have over the classes and their ability to pick and choose courses which suit their requirements.

"There is a high degree of interest from people that want a specific type of training," Tilton says. "We are offering a one stop shop of courses they can pick and choose from."

From a managerial point of view, Tilton says online training has enabled the bank to save time and money.

"We can train people within a week of a new product going to market. The rapidity with which we can deploy a training module is remarkable and has some fundamental impacts on the pace of business," Tilton says.

Making the numbers

While analyst company IDC has been forced to release a downward revision of its initial predictions of growth in the e-learning sector, Cindy Sim, IT services research analyst for IDC in Asia, says the sector is still set for a compound annual growth rate of 28 percent during the next four years, with the bulk of the growth predicted to take place towards the end of the period.

"From an overall Asia Pac point of view, I see the largest growth happening in 2005, from now until then I really do not expect sudden spurts of growth," Sim said.

However some vendors are more enthusiastic. Damian Hass, manager for Lotus e-learning at IBM Australia, says the sector is already growing rapidly and is on the verge of "explosive growth".

"Enterprises are very focused on using it as a tool to improve their performance," Hass said. "It is a major cost reduction factor for many organisations."

However, growth and stability appear uncorrelated in a market which has seen significant consolidation, as many of larger vendors muscle their way into an attractive market space.

Frank Cselko, senior director of education with Oracle, describes e-learning as the last of the cottage industries, saying it was traditionally based on a large number of small developers or consultancies capable of providing specific, if limited, service.

"For a lot of the smaller companies, the cost of development these days is such that it will send you broke," Cselko says, reeling off a series of developers and integrators which have scaled back their Australian operations. "To some degree, the dot-com wave caught up with the sector, but on the other hand a lot of these organisations lack the standards which the industry requires."

According to Cselko, corporate e-learning consumers are increasingly wary of installing software which they later discover to be difficult to integrate with other systems.

The concern regarding integration is largely derived from the fact that e-learning systems are increasingly integrated into HR and ERP systems within companies.

Tania Wickman, business development manager for Internet Software developers Web Raven, says that the ability to keep track of an employee's usage and results enabled employers and managers to earmark people for promotion based on their performance.

"Compliance and tracking is a big issues at the moment. When there is a legal requirement that all staff have a certain type of qualification, or are aware of a particular piece of legislation, suddenly the 'old school' of management sit up and start taking e-learning seriously," Wickman says. "Not only can online management deliver the required content in a creative way, it can carry out the assessments and record the results."

Cselko says that the level of integration is such that employees may not even realise they are in an e-learning environment because of the way didactic software can be integrated into standard company computer systems.

"The systems is just integrated into the way they work in the office, so that people are receiving new information while they work," Cselko said. "We use an approach like this in our sales centre."

Learning to manage e-learning

While those that have managed to crack the implementation algorithm are overwhelmingly enthusiastic, there are some significant pitfalls e-learning managers need to watch out for when implementing an online learning system.

Web Raven's Wickman says the decision to implement a system is unlikely to succeed unless it has the enthusiastic support of upper management.

"The purchase of an e-learning suites really affects the full strategic direction of a company and it is important to coordinate it in the overall direction of the company," Wickman says. "If they just hand it to the IT department and expect them to deal with it, it will not have the management support it requires."

IBM's Haas says organisations need to look at the implementation of an e-learning technology from several different angles.

"One of the key challenges in migrating to an e-learning approach is understanding the context of learning within an organisation," Haas says. "There is no doubt that people often view training as a reward; they enjoy taking the afternoon off work and going into the class room and getting the Minties. People see it as all part of the training experience and e-learning takes it away."

For this reason Haas says managers need to be aware of the role training plays within an organisation and take this into account when implementing the solution.

One of the key groups management needs to pay attention to is trainers, who may feel threatened by a new e-learning system. However, the most successful implementations are those which integrate face-to-face training into their systems.

"The success rate and satisfaction rate is far higher in a blended environment where e-learning is used to compliment and support face-to-face training," Wickman said. "It shouldn't be seen as a replacement."

Having implemented such an approach Rebel Sport, Ford says e-learning should be implemented where it is most appropriate, but not in every instant where training is required.

"Originally we always had to keep an eye on measuring quality of training rather than quantity and that is where a lot of other companies come into pitfalls," Ford said. "Not only does it need to be interactive, it needs to be effective."

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