eLearning brings world-class training right to your desktop
 Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company, providing software and services to firms around the globe. Oracle's worldwide reach provides support to customers in 27 languages in any time zone in which their customers do business. Oracle has more than 14,000 application and technology developers and over 7,000 highly skilled support professionals offering maintenance and problem resolution for Oracle technology and application products. At eLearning Africa, the company will highlight its activities in Africa, including its engagement in the NEPAD E-schools initiative, as well as in the private sector.
One of the fastest-growing sectors of Human Resources Management today is Internet-based training, known generally as eLearning . IDC Research estimates that the global eLearning market is now growing at an annual compound rate of 150 per cent and predicts that it is now worth $23 billion. Furthermore, Gartner Group believes that more than two thirds of Global 1000 enterprises now include eLearning as part of a formal Business-to-Employee (B2E) initiative.
Many HR executives are now also considering eLearning to improve productivity, reduce the cost of holding physical seminars, minimise training expenses and improve knowledge sharing. Another key driver is the global focus on good corporate governance. “It is impossible for any organisation to achieve compliance unless all its employees have the necessary skills, capabilities and training and not simply in their day-to-day duties but also in the business practices, ethical guidelines and regulatory or statutory requirements,” said Brian Gregory, a Senior Director at Oracle, one of the leading suppliers of eLearning software.
Corporate governance goes beyond making a legitimate profit; it is much more about making sure the whole organisation operates according to the highest qualitative and quantitative standards.
The area where eLearning can make the most effective contribution to good corporate governance is in ethics and compliance training. Companies and public sector organisations alike can mitigate risk of regulatory non-compliance by simply reminding employees of the industry rules and regulations to which they are bound. This seems obvious, but an Internet search quickly reveals that many breaches of compliance across a wide variety of industries are due to insufficient staff training. To give just one example, the 2001 Julius Report about Banking Code compliance found that 53% of the UK banks assessed had weak training and competence in this area.
The reason is that industry codes of conduct tend to be communicated to employees at their induction, when they are new to the job environment and need to take in a lot of different information on the same day. Subsequent refreshers are often sporadic and outdated. Considering the pace at which the regulatory environment shifts in some industries, more frequent training would undoubtedly help reduce the number of compliance breaches.
Results and benefits like these are propelling HR professionals to move eLearning out of the “IT ghetto” - where it has been used almost exclusively by IT specialists to acquire new computer skills or take online certification courses - into the wider organisation.
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By Peter Heydenrych, Corporate Communications, Oracle South Africa and African Operations
 Newsportal: Articles
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