Harnessing learning technology to succeed in business

Businesses need to make money and/or save money if they want to be successful. Organisations are now realising that they can do both if they implement software systems – known as learning management systems (LMS) – to collect and analyse data relating to the skills of their workforce. While, once, it was enough to have transferred some training materials from the classroom to CD‐ROM, people soon began to wonder whether anyone actually used the CD‐ROMs. With that realisation, the concept of a learning management system was born. One of the most advanced LMSs in the world – and a market leader, with some 2,500 users world‐wide – is the LMS produced by Pathlore. It lets companies plan, deliver and manage e‐learning, then assess learning performance by student, group, line of business or across the entire extended enterprise. The system also lets companies manage their organisational skills and competencies: employees assess themselves online and then go directly to prescribed online or classroom learning. Although this technology is not a panacea and will not pay dividends for every company, it can offer great benefits to those organisations with a large and/or widely geographically dispersed workforce.