Understand your audience

IT professionals form the biggest challenges to trainers when it comes to e-learning, says Iain Smith of IT consultancy Diaz Research

Once upon a time, people learned in only two ways: by making mistakes and by listening to other people describing their mistakes and conclusions. You could call the latter p-learning.

Eventually, classes were set up so that one mistake-maker could teach more than one learner in a group, and c-learning was born.

After a long time someone had the idea of writing things down in books: b-learning. This meant that you could still learn from others, even if you were not in the same room as them - or even not alive at the same time.

There then followed hundreds of years during which making mistakes, p-learning and b-learning were the only learning options. Until the 20th century and v-learning: the educational video, the Open University, for example - a major advance.

Now, of course, we have e-learning. It is illuminating to consider the future of e-learning by asking how coaching actually happens in the information technology sector itself.

IT employers have long had a poor-to-indifferent record on training and development. Many prefer to buy in skills, not develop them. That has not changed with e-learning, but research from Taylor Nelson Sofres (carried out on behalf of SkillSoft) indicates that the IT community uses e-learning more than others. Why?

The answer partly lies in economics, not IT's zeal for training. Despite some claims, good e-learning products are not cheap, but they are cost-effective if the costs can be shared by large numbers of learners.

They are well-suited to mass learning, and mass learning means generic skills such as English language, financial, customer care and, of course, mainstream computer skills - common applications, operating systems and languages.

This makes it relevant to people in IT, but it does not extend cost-effectively into specialist technologies - there the e-learning product is obsolescent before it is launched and obsolete before it has broken even.

So, e-learning has its place in IT, and elsewhere, when aimed at generic needs. But specialist needs - and they are dominant in IT where there are scores of tools, at multiple release levels - remain untouched. This primitive world is stuck at 3,000-year-old technology: learning by making mistakes, and by p-learning (when all else fails).

The reasons are primarily economic, but also cultural. Many IT people are puzzle-solvers who prefer to "try it and see". Don't send them on a training course - you'll only stop them learning. That is the challenge that remains for training professionals, despite the e-learning revolution.

Iain Smith is founder of IT human resources consultancy Diaz Research www.diazresearch.com