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BESPOKE e-LEARNING IN THE FINANCIAL SERVICES SECTOR (July 2008)

My company specialises in training services for the financial services sector generally - and the insurance industry in particular. We have seen a marked shift in training and development spending in this market over the last few years from face to face to e-learning. To some extent this is simply the result of the increasing maturity and availability of suitable e-learning resources. But a key driver of the change has been the more demanding regulatory regime introduced by the FSA, which took over supervision of the general insurance sector in January 2006.

With a new more daunting regulator breathing down their necks on training and competency issues, most firms concluded that they needed, at the very least, to be seen to be doing more about training their staff. But T&C was just one of a dozen or more items flagged by the FSA as an area of concern. So with multiple simultaneous calls on their often modest budgets, insurance firms felt they had little choice. Out went more expensive face-to-face training - a high-quality intervention for the few - and in came e-learning as a catchall provision for the many. Looking around our market today we see many, if not most, firms linked up to some kind of e-learning platform, but few making truly effective use of them.

Objectively it makes little sense to buy in a learning management system (LMS) for your staff if you are not going to focus on getting maximum return on your investment. But when you consider that the motivation for most recent e-learning expenditure in the insurance sector has been much more about stick and much less about carrot, it becomes more understandable. There are two main reasons why many firms are not getting value for money from their LMS investments. The more obvious problem is a tendency not to devote enough attention to planning, managing and monitoring employees' use of an e-learning system once it is in place. But another obstacle is the question of how relevant users feel the material on the system is to their specific training and development needs and to their daily working lives.

Lack of direct relevance to learners is inevitable, up to a point, with any generic learning system. Although the insurance-specific system my own company has put together includes hundreds of modules on virtually every aspect of technical insurance, on regulation and on IT, management and marketing skills, despite the fact that the learning materials are written to the highest standards and continually updated, it remains essentially generic. That's fine if you just want to jump through the regulator's T&C hoop - assuming you can actually show your staff are using and benefiting from the system. But if you want your staff to acquire the specific knowledge and the specific skills to function at maximum efficiency within your business, you probably need something more.

From our experience of authoring bespoke materials for all types of LMS - our own and other people's - we've had the opportunity to see that the firms who really get value from e-learning are those who put in a bit more thought and commission professional third parties to produce online training material that is specific to their business, to their products and procedures, to their customer base, their business partners and their company policy. Bringing in professional authors to create e-learning materials around the key information employees need to absorb both codifies and disseminates knowledge that empowers people across the business.

With a little imagination and access to the right expert authoring skills, e-learning can be used as a vehicle for virtually any type of information - for example one of our clients has an e-learning version of their HR manual, to which they direct all new recruits - and when it sits on an LMS, managers can check quickly and easily who has read what, and can test knowledge acquisition with an end of course quiz.

Of course, the value of bespoke materials ultimately depends on how well they function as e-learning. However relevant the information may be, it must still be properly designed and authored to ensure smooth and effective knowledge transfer. Something that reads like a book will not necessarily work as e-learning. The form in which content is deployed is primarily shaped by the structure of the LMS in question. It should make full use of the system's capabilities and not attempt to do things to which the system is not well suited. But above all, e-learning should be designed to be appropriate to its intended users. It should be neither too dry and academic nor too simplistic or dumbed-down. If it incorporates graphics or animations these must be appropriate to the audience. Its vocabulary and tone of voice must feel familiar and comfortable to the learner. And with bespoke e-learning, there is a unique opportunity to ensure they reflect the organisation's approach, philosophy and corporate style.

Professionally put together bespoke learning materials will blend seamlessly with generic materials on the same system and replicate whatever house styles or branding normally apply. The very fact that users encounter materials on an LMS that are clearly directly relevant to them helps to encourage confidence in the system as a whole and in the value of e-learning. Using company-specific and role-specific materials helps to make the most effective use of learners' time. It also gets around the situation where an employee works through a standard module on, say, employers' liability insurance - only to have to unlearn part of what they have taken in when a senior colleague tells them that the specific policy wording used doesn't work quite like that. Better by far to get the relevant knowledge acquisition done in one pass. Some of the most effective e-learning modules we have put together and seen in use impart knowledge of a particular target customer group or industry to employees new to one of a firm's key areas of specialisation.

All of this will only work really effectively if the bespoke materials pay proper attention to the principles and science of human cognitive processes and cater properly for a full range of learning styles. Their language must be carefully crafted to capture and hold readers' attention, with vivid and immediate bite-sized chunks of information that are palatable and easily digested. Learning objectives must be clearly set out at the beginning, and tested at the end. There should be continual prompts to recall and consolidate and periodic opportunities to test and apply the knowledge acquired in the course of the learning module. Only if it is constructed with this kind of technical understanding, will online learning function fully effectively.

If this all sounds a little daunting, the reality can be far less so. In virtually any industry sector there are specialist T&C providers out there with the necessary combination of subject matter expertise and e-learning design and authorship skills to help you make the most of your LMS. Employing their services need not be particularly costly - whether to create specific learning materials for which you have already determined a need or to help you understand where a little additional input can significantly improve the value your business derives from its LMS.



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