Press releases

Redtray’s Inspirations Day highlights top tips for improving e-learning

American Express’ training and development manager shares top tips for e-learning success

London, UK – 25 May 2010: Redtray hosted the first in a series of Inspirations Days, designed to inspire optimal business transformation through people, last week. Attended by over fifty L&D Managers, Training Managers and Learning experts from all walks of industry, the event highlighted that one of greatest hurdles in the industry was driving staff and customers to complete learning activities.

The event was deemed a resounding success with its focus on knowledge sharing and discussion, identifying and providing solutions to challenges and showcasing the latest learning technologies. Most noted were the practical solutions presented by Samantha Hansford, Training and Development Manager EMEA for American Express. Samantha’s top tips to ensure e-learning success included:

• Check the appetite for e-learning within your organisation: Ensure that you have buy-in from your stakeholders, budget owners and the end user.
• Really understand all your options: There are many different types of e-learning from rapid build to bespoke options. Understand what these really are by viewing demos, reviewing them to experience what the learner will experience.
• Consider the big picture: Depending on your project scope, consider the sustainability of the solution. Identify opportunities for long-term use of e-learning and make them suitable for future projects. Therefore, be careful with the content and language that is used.
• Have a kick off meeting: Pull together all content and learning experts plus your external e-learning specialist to shape the content and create a structure with which everyone is familiar. During this meeting, be sure to determine roles, responsibilities and key milestones/timelines.
• Have knowledge experts on board and available: Don’t underestimate the time involved for the content sign off stages. e-learning requires several stages of sign off which must have involvement from all parties.
• Understand the design process of e-learning vs. traditional learning: e-learning is built differently so timelines need to be adjusted considerably. When designing classroom training, I would often get the content right and then work on the look and feel. It took me a while to understand that the look and feel plus content are worked on simultaneously for e-learning.
• Involve the end users throughout the design phase: Select trusted ‘end users’ who can support the design phase, to find out what will engage them and most importantly, what won’t engage them.
• Recognise the learner experience vs. cost: Realise that it may well be worth paying more for e-learning that engages the user and gives a more visually stimulating experience. Also be aware that costs can run away so defining look and feel upfront is important.
• Be sure to incorporate a monitoring and reporting tool: By choosing a reporting tool as part of our solution, we were able to report back to the business on utilisation, pass marks and evaluation scores. Invaluable!!! One of our key challenges in the past had been uptake, having this information provided our team leaders with greater visibility.

Also presenting on the day and sharing their wealth of experiences and lessons learned over the years were Robert Humphrey, EMEA Functional Learning and Development Manager of CSC and Adam Williams, Program Delivery Manager of NATS.

Inspirations Day attendees expressed their satisfaction with the event and all agreed that the speakers were informative and interesting. They found Inspirations Day to be a thought-provoking event, spurring them to reconsider how they approach learning activities.

Bob Woodland, Chairman and CEO of Redtray, explains “that it was fantastic to have such a great turn out to our first Inspirations Day and it was a privilege to hear client success stories and the challenges they had overcome. As an industry leader, it is our role to foster knowledge sharing and to provide an opportunity for senior level managers to network and learn from one another’s experiences. This is the best way forward in terms of improving industry best practice and also a great way to support our clients in the roles they perform.”

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About Redtray
Redtray is one of Europe’s leading Training Outsourcing providers and the trusted partner of many FTSE 250 organisations. Established in 2001, Redtray develops innovative and award–winning workforce performance optimisation programmes and delivers them to tens of thousands of staff each year. Using the latest blended learning approaches Redtray enables its clients to develop the skills of its people so they can deliver on their business goals – whilst increasing the value of training and reducing its cost by half.

www.redtray.co.uk

For further press information, please contact:

Marianne Falconer,
Marketing,
Redtray Solutions Ltd
T: +44 (0)2070 244862
E: marianne.falconer@redtray.co.uk
www.redtray.co.uk