Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 5, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
This is the finding of a recent survey of HR managers at the top 500 companies commissioned by the high-tech association BITKOM. According to the survey, 55 percent of companies with more than 1,000 employees use electronic learning with computers and the internet. Medium-sized companies, by contrast, still have some catching up to do. On average, only one in four medium-sized companies currently uses e-learning. “E-learning has become an established part of education and professional development,” said BITKOM President Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer when presenting the study at CeBIT in Hanover. “During the economic crisis, e-learning can noticeably ease pressure on personnel budgets without reducing the quality of professional development.” Two thirds of the companies surveyed cite cost and time savings as a principal reason for using e-learning. The most important reason for its introduction is greater spatial and temporal flexibility in learning, cited by 86 percent of respondents. Scheer said: “With e-learning, employees assume greater responsibility for their learning success. They are free to decide when and at what pace they learn.”
BITKOM estimates that the German e-learning market currently has a volume of approximately EUR 200 million. It includes learning software, digital learning content from professional providers and specialised hardware in particular. This is supplemented by the amounts companies spend developing individual solutions. BITKOM says that Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and social networks are increasingly being used in corporate professional development alongside conventional applications. More than one third of companies use wikis and weblogs. “Users create most of the content themselves here, which encourages many employees to participate,” said Scheer. Twenty-seven percent of companies use podcasts or videocasts, meaning audio or video recordings of seminars that can be played over the internet. One in five companies uses social networks in which participants can exchange views on job-related topics. “The use of Web 2.0 applications is giving e-learning an enormous boost,” said Scheer. Younger employees in particular already know such applications from their education or leisure time. “Companies can introduce Web 2.0 tools relatively easily and inexpensively. This makes them a kind of icebreaker for more complex e-learning applications,” Scheer said.
Conventional forms of e-learning continue to have the greatest importance. Three quarters of companies use web-based training (WBT). In internet-supported learning, training courses are made available to users online and are often completed online as well. Sixty-one percent of respondents use computer-based training (CBT), in which applications are generally supplied on CD-ROM or DVD. Forty-one percent of companies use video conferences and virtual classrooms, where learners are connected directly by internet or telephone.
According to the BITKOM survey, standard IT applications lead the list of content. Three quarters of companies use computer-supported learning to teach the use of word processing, spreadsheets or email systems. Fifty-seven percent cite product training, 55 percent commercial expertise and 53 percent foreign languages as learning objectives. Forty-three percent of companies use e-learning to teach soft skills, including negotiation, time management and rhetoric. “Until now, e-learning was regarded primarily as an inexpensive way to convey standard knowledge quickly to a large number of participants. Today it can be used for every subject and type of content, however complex,” said Scheer. This also applies across different levels of hierarchy. Scheer said: “From trainees to top managers, everyone learns with computers and the internet.”
Methodology: For the survey, the Institute for Media and Competence Research (MMB) in Essen interviewed HR managers at large companies on behalf of BITKOM.
