Training is a key and fundamental management function that permeates through an organization, and transcends functions and roles to help every individual employee grow with the organization. Therefore, whether an individual is an engineer, a salesperson, a secretary or an accountant, training is essential in his function to empower him to develop his knowledge base, and to advance his career and usefulness with the organization.

Today, training can no longer be neglected by all organizations. Training and development can propel an organization forward by empowering its employees with the right knowledge. As Singapore migrates from a production-centric economy to that of a knowledge-based economy, training is the only thing that can help achieve that. Already, labor costs and material costs are forcing many large organizations to succumb to retrenchment, downsizing, or outright relocation to other countries with lower business costs. The retrenched employees are in dire need of training or re-training to make them more employable.

At the same time, rather than allow these organizations to relocate, there is an urgent need to bring employees to expert levels so that knowledge and expertise become the compelling factors for organizations to remain in the region, since productivity is directly proportional to knowledge and expertise. You can employ 100 unskilled workers, or 10 expert workers. The 10 expert workers will easily perform all the work of the 100 unskilled workers, while still having the skills to manage projects and other unskilled workers. At the same time, training experienced workers is easier for trainers, while unskilled workers are often the bane of even the most experienced trainers.

However, many organizations are still using only classroom training as the only platform to deliver training content, based on a survey conducted by McGallen & Bolden in its nationwide training platform survey conducted in 1998. However, the trend is changing, as the same survey showed that more than 40% of the respondents believed that computer-based training or web-based training is more effective and productive than classroom training. These respondents also perceived technology-based training as capable of addressing cultural diversity, which is one of the key sticking points in the past where training directors relied heavily on classroom training to address human-related issues. A healthy 20% of the respondents also believed that by the year 2000, their companies may invest more than 50% of their training budgets to cater to technology-based training.

Traditional computer-based training (CBT) was an expensive exercise for many pioneering organizations. The start-up hardware for development and client platform delivery, and the development costs for the software and any associated multimedia (video and audio) segments, were prohibitive to most small and medium enterprises. Therefore, most CBT programs were developed within or for large multinational organizations, especially those in the technical and engineering fields where CBT was deployed.

CBT has evolved through the years, and with the evolution of the Internet, CBT has transformed into web-based training (WBT), which utilizes the Internet web browser as the delivery platform. With WBT, the client platform is no longer restricted to specific machines such as Apple Macintosh (which provided the richest multimedia environment) or Microsoft Windows running on multimedia-capable PCs. Today, WBT is deployed across Mac OS, Windows 9x/NT, UNIX (including Linux and freeBSD) and even specialized platforms such as WebTV. WBT can be pervasive because the Internet's multimedia technologies are mostly cross-platform, and a training developer can literally develop WBT programs once on his or her preferred platform (such as the Mac OS), and then deploy the finished program on any client environment that can handle the multimedia data types.

WBT has some advantages and some perceived disadvantages. For example, WBT is known to save costs, save manpower, and yet provide the delivery capabilities of traditional CBT and some classroom training as well. However, some organizations or individuals are still holding onto the perception that WBT cannot deliver human-centric content where human interaction is important. WBT cannot replace classroom training right now, but the majority of technical training, as well as "soft skills" training such as customer service and salesmanship have already found themselves digitized effectively into the WBT realm. This is because WBT can provide video content, where some degree of "human" interaction can result. As bandwidth increases and compression technologies evolve more, video content no longer has to be tiny (such as 160 by 120 pixels), but can provide up to full-screen (such as 640 by 480 pixels) resolution to provide as close as possible a human-centric experience.

At the same time, WBT today costs a fraction of the costs associated with traditional CBT. For example, a typical scenario of an industrial production plant with 200 employees (executives and technical) would be an ideal environment to implement WBT.

Typically, in this particular scenario, WBT can be developed for areas such as technical sales delivery, technical support, and other hard skills programs. In a one-hour WBT program with 90% textual content and 10% multimedia content, the delivery cycle can take 2 to 3 weeks, with about US$10,000 upwards for development costs, depending on complexity and if multimedia components are required.

In a typical WBT program, an industrial plant can migrate all the necessary questions and answers related to servicing technical customers into a database, and then deploy a script-based Web delivery system to provide employees the knowledgebase, while providing automated testing for all employees handling customers to ascertain their knowledge level periodically.

For small and medium-sized enterprises that need to get on the HR intranet environment quickly, there are solutions which can help these organizations develop their HR intranet for learning within weeks, with very little outside resources needed. Such template-based technologies are cost-effective, and would appeal to anyone with some basic knowledge of web page or site authoring. Through Java technology, such organizations can also tap on available navigation development technologies to quickly bring unique interaction and interface elements on the intranet, and further develop for them.

Beyond the delivery platform, the next tier for organizations is to provide surveys and testing capabilities for their WBT programs. For that, a server-based Perl program that allows organizations to design surveys, questionnaires and online tests using nothing more than a word processor, can be deployed. Such a program would be able to serve the questions and return answers and scores to the users and HR managers. Perl is cross-platform scripting language that can be used to develop such as program and can run across UNIX, Windows NT and even Mac OS.

Currently, many small and medium enterprises are not yet providing training management online, since most such tools are in the region of tens of thousands of dollars and can run only on limited platforms. Training management is an important auxilliary component within the Human Resource Management function, where employees' information, their eligibility for specific training programs, attendance, scores and training schedules are all centrally managed. There is current research underway to develop a Web-compatible, light-weight training management server software that will specifically target small and medium enterprises to address training management needs, without all the less-used features. At the same time, because the Web is a universal platform, this solution will work with clients' platforms seamlessly without requiring the clients to purchase additional hardware, or to have additional technical support personnel just to service this platform.

So, as the regional Asian economies slowly recover from the shell shock of the economic crisis, training becomes the compelling tool to mould, re-shape, and evolve the workforce to make the regional economies competitive again. Asian economies must move forward to not only be affordable places to produce goods and do business, but provide an excellent, knowledgeable and productive workforce. As budgets shrink in Asian organizations, the need to train employees does not decrease. On the contrary, there is an urgent need to step up training in every hard and soft skill area. Therefore, Web-based training will become a cost-saving and yet effective training delivery vehicle, and allow managers to develop key learning content periodically, and still find time to do their main functional roles. That is only possible with WBT, since traditional classroom training would have removed these managers from their jobs to deliver the same training content over and over again to new hires.

Copyright (c) 1991-1999 Seamus Phan