Five reasons your organisation should invest in eLearning

You've spotted an eLearning course that would be perfect for your colleagues and help them grow as a team. Unfortunately, your organisation has a tight budget to stick to this year, and it isn’t easy to convince the boss to allocate the funds.

The question is, how can you make the case for eLearning? Why should your organisation take notice?

The benefits of learning in the workplace are well-documented, and with 42 per cent of Fortune 500 companies implementing eLearning programs, your organisation is at risk of falling behind without one. 

In this article, we will explore how to encourage those in management to embrace eLearning, and demonstrate that it is a long-term investment worth making. 

Making the case for eLearning

Online learning is an increasingly popular way to perform workplace training, but some managers will need persuading when it comes to allocating both the time and money to this relatively new concept. 

Our advice is to let the benefits of eLearning speak for themselves.  The following points should help you to get started with communicating the unexpected advantages of investment in online courses:

1. eLearning improves employee retention

Opportunities for ongoing learning and growth are important for employees to feel invested in the organisation they work for.  Ultimately, human beings function best in environments which allow them to grow. 

Deloitte’s 2017 ‘Global Human Capital Trends’ report found 42 per cent of millennials are likely to leave their organisations because they’re not learning fast enough. The data also reveals that among millennials, the “ability to learn and progress” is now a key element in their perception of a company’s brand.

Employee turnover is also expensive.  Josh Bersin of Deloitte estimates the cost of losing an employee to be 1.5-2.0 x the employee’s annual salary.  This could mean a company losing anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each time an employee moves on. 

With this in mind, giving employees the opportunity to engage with eLearning courses seems like a small price to pay.

2. Proven return on investment

Improving employee retention isn’t the only reason investment in eLearning makes good business sense.

If you are going to convince your leadership team that eLearning is the way to go, they will need to understand it in terms of a business plan. To do this, highlight the shortcomings of your current method of training (if any), and explain why eLearning would be better financially.

You can also measure the ROI of online training using Kirkpatrick's model of evaluation as a starting point. 

3. Improved quality of employee learning

Your leadership team will also want to know what employees stand to gain if they adopt online learning tools.

Research shows that eLearning increases retention rates 25-60 percent.  In comparison, retention rates of face-to-face training are much lower at 8-10 percent. 

If your organisation is already spending big on face-to-face learning, these stats could show that eLearning would have more overall impact, and be better value for money. 

4. Conduct a Training Needs Assessment

A Training Needs Assessment (TNA) is a way of determining if a training need exists in your organisation.  If it does, the assessment can review what training is required to fill the gaps.

This is designed to make the connection between a required performance or desired behaviour and the actual performance or behaviour in your organisation. 

When your leadership team is presented with this data, it might make more sense to invest in online learning as a means of improving efficiency or addressing a particular challenge. 

There could also be considerable scale and diversity in training needs.  In this case, those in leadership could be more likely to opt for the flexible solutions an eLearning platform can offer. 

5. Saving employees’ time

Data also shows that eLearning participants learn nearly five times more material than those attending face-to-face courses, without increasing the time spent training.

A traditional face-to-face training course might typically take a day, meaning an employee would need to spend a whole day out of work to focus on learning.

With online courses, employees can log on anytime, anywhere. Participants can spend ten minutes learning from a video, then get back to their regular tasks for that day.

The fact that eLearning is presented in bite-sized chunks also makes information easier to digest and retain. 

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