Current companies need to compete with products or services that live up to international quality standards and whose delivery is met on time and it surpasses all expectations. Today there’s even more pressure, local markets have become global and there’s a need to adapt to change in order to stay productive.

Aside from cutting edge facilities, equipment and materials, companies need trained collaborators that are committed to all products and service processes.

If we take into account that technology is constantly updated and that companies renew their hardware and software in a very short amount of time in order to stay up to speed, how can we have collaborators that are also up to date and that can adapt themselves to these changes?

Training is the best answer; it allows you to distribute both academic and technical knowledge required by your staff in order to increase the efficiency in which all tasks are fulfilled. Preparing your staff is an investment that can’t be postponed.

Nonetheless, traditional training methods are translated into large budgets and mayor planning and logistic efforts that can go from coordinating training sessions that fit everyone’s work schedule to moving your collaborators from their work centers to the place where the class will be held.

In the end there’s no way of ensuring that the learning objectives are met, due to the fact that there are several factors like the lack of time and resources that may inflict in each of the student’s ability to take in, practice and settle any doubts he or she may have. Also there are always a percentage of collaborators that won’t receive the training at all due to different reasons (vacations, illnesses, etc) and that they will need to wait until a new session is programmed.

 eLearning changes this reality and it optimizes a training project’s results thanks to the use of information and communication technologies involved in educational activities. It also lets the student learn at their own pace and in the right time and place without having to move from one point to the other.

A virtual course, with instructional design’s best practices in mind can guarantee an increase in the learning processes’ quality because it is centered in the student and not on the instructor or tutor and content is reinforced with text, audio, images, examples, practices and feedback among many other learning strategies.

Some of the advantages that eLearning has to offer are:

• Standardization: all collaborators receive the same content.
• Reutilization: different people can take advantage of the same training in different places of the world.
• Asynchrony (flexibility in schedules): each collaborator can be trained in the time that suits the company best.
• Self-taught: each person learns in a self inflicted manner and at his or her own pace following an already set structure and schedule.

eLearning has accomplished significant advances in corporate training not just because it applies technology to learning but also because it contributes to skill development and human resources’ growth in organizations.