Jan Hagen director of solution at Wide Learning offers tips on how to market
e-learning internally www.widelearning.com
What advice can you offer on drawing up an internal marketing campaign to
help my e-learning and knowledge-sharing initiative gain wider acceptance?
Ask yourself this first: is the aim of using internal communications to win
people over to learn differently, or is it to achieve a set of business
objectives which are supported by a learning strategy that delivers these
objectives? The answer is probably ‘both’.
The first step towards marketing e-learning internally is to produce an
all-encompassing plan on an organisational learning strategy, then to promote
the concept so that the different components of this strategy make the
organisation a more competitive and better place to work.
Remember that concepts such as peer-to-peer (p2p) and collaborative learning
are no longer new, and selling them as breakthroughs in learning and
communication only helps to create a negative uptake.
The key is to explain to staff that they already go through many learning
interventions, and this is simply an opportunity to capture this knowledge more
generally.
An e-learning initiative will have far more success if it is supported by a
marketing campaign. However, if the HR team tries to implement this strategy
without explaining how it fits into the overall business strategy, rest assured
that the learning strategy would fail to connect with the business objectives.
