Before you take the final decision of whether to implement eLearning in your company or not it’s good to be aware of the challenges that you’ll be facing. As many as they can be, there are always ways, as in anything else in business or life, to turn them to your advantage and look at them as opportunities.
There are usually three main challenges that you face:
Too much effort
This one is often cited as one of the top challenges to trainers, human resource managers and marketers when it comes to implementing an eLearning model in an organization. It’s true that it’s no easy fit to make the initial decision based on the needs of your company, develop a plan, then follow it through and implement. And of course, you have to keep in mind how you’ll continuously develop good quality content, and keep employees and partners engaged in using it and benefiting from it in their course of work. Therefore, it is important that you set yourself clear objectives that will be achieved through eLearning and measure and evaluate how your effort and time is spent towards completing them.
Too much time
Yes, implementing eLearning in your organization means that you have to be committed to investing a good amount of your time into it to get it right. However, with careful step by step planning your time will not be wasted, and the implementation effort will be a worthy investment that will pay down the road. Carefully evaluate each activity that you will need to undertake. From choosing the right platform, defining the needs of each stakeholder and department in order to set achievable and measurable objective to customization, implementation and launch of the system. They are all necessary steps, but there are also others that are often overlooked. In some cases, overcoming internal obstacles that are inherent to eLearning like the lack of awareness and conviction on behalf of some key players can add to the time and put your schedule out of kilt. You’ll need to become an advocate and champion even before you’ve started down the implementation path.
Too much money
Even though the initial investment in eLearning might seem prohibitive to many organizations, it is important to look at the money spent as a long-term investment. Only after you carefully consider the return that your investment in online training can yield, will you be able to know its true cost. In other words, ‘too much’ now can actually be a sound spending if you look at all the cost savings that it will bring in one, two or more years from the moment you start using the eLearning system.
In many organizations eLearning works very well alongside traditional methods of training and knowledge distribution, and it is not hard to calculate the savings that you can realize right from the start (for example by replacing many face-to-face trainings with online courses, especially when it comes with low involvement activities such as compliance or software instruction). In addition to the clear benefits that eLearning has to your bottom line, there will be many other, harder to measure but nevertheless evident gains. The faster and more effectively your workforce builds its skills for example, the higher the productivity. Make sure you set the right KPIs to measure this, so you can prove the long-term cost benefit of your eLearning program.
When you set your goals there will surely be many challenges to overcome in order to achieve them. Sometimes the bigger the challenges, the better the opportunity as they might give you your best shot at proving just how valuable eLearning can be for your organization.
In our next blog post you can find out more about how to sell your eLearning to internal stakeholders, so you are ready to take the next steps towards implementation.
