Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Dec 23, 2004
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Dec 23, 2004 |
|
|
|
|
|
Info-Tech
-
IT Training Cos gearing up for major share of e-learning pie Our Bureau
Pune , Dec. 22 INDIA, with its huge English-speaking workforce that already has had experience in BPO, e-learning and tech support domains, is strategically poised to get a large portion of the $21-billion business that e-learning is expected to be globally by 2008, says Mr Nick Van Dam, Chief Learning Officer, Deloitte. "Seventy-five per cent of organisations worldwide are expected to outsource learning work in the near future and India can benefit from the exponential growth in e-learning because it has a ready pool of talent waiting to be tapped,'' he adds. Mr Dam should know, considering that his company, which employs some 1,20,000 people globally, has roped in Pune-based company, Maximize Learning, to develop quality learning for its requirements. As companies, both Indian and global, look outside of their organisation for learning resources, owing to a variety of factors such as lack of in-house talent in the domain and no access to best practices and talent in the field, Indian companies in e-learning are gearing up to get a larger slice of the lucrative e-learning pie that was pegged at $6.5 billion in 2003. At Maximize Learning, for instance, CEO, Mr Sushant Buttan, is firming up plans to hire a whopping 1,500 people in the next 18 months and is toying with a number of working models, which will ensure that the staff it hires, stick around. Over the next few months, the company plans to set up satellite offices in Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, largely to accommodate staff who leave the company to relocate to these cities. In January, Maximize will kick off its working-out-of-home effort, which will allow a new category of talented and qualified people, who are unable to commute to work, to join the company. A new division is being set up at the company that will exclusively devote itself towards delivering work on-site to this new category of workers, says Mr Buttan. The company's new facilities will have an in-house creche so that talented staff don't leave for want of support at home for kids! "We plan to notch up some 80,000 sq ft more of working space in the next year to accommodate the new people coming on board,'' says Mr Buttan. "There is a growing demand for media specialists, e-learning developers, instructional designers, graphic designers, people who re-design and implement learning business processes, among other things." The promised business potential, meanwhile, is already pouring in, according to Mr Buttan. He points out that American Express, for which it provided e-learning resources for its overseas operations, has now pulled it on board for e-learning work in India, which is its fastest growing operations. The Indian market for e-learning is currently pegged at $150 million, which, he says is just the tip of the iceberg since Indian corporates have not even begun to understand the benefits of adopting e-learning. "India will hire at least 10,000 people in the e-learning industry in the next few years," he adds. For enterprises, adopting e-learning can mean significant benefits since it reduces time taken for training by 50 per cent, reduces time to market new skills, improves learning by 15-25 per cent and has proved to help in higher retention of learning by an estimated 25-50 per cent. Even as companies in the e-learning domain are trying to grapple with the exponential growth in business, Mr Buttan says the next step in the evolution of e-learning has already landed on the horizon in the form of e-learning simulation with 50 per cent of enterprises set to adopt the new entrant in their business.
More Stories on : IT Training | Education
Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page
|
Stories in this Section |
|
The Hindu Group: Home | About Us | Copyright | Archives | Contacts | Subscription Group Sites: The Hindu | Business Line | Sportstar | Frontline | The Hindu eBooks | The Hindu Images | Home |
Copyright © 2004, The
Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of
this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of
The Hindu Business Line
|