About half of the largest companies in Victoria use eLearning to train their staff, spending more than $159M annually on this and reaching over 350,000 people. Further, 61% of these companies expect this level of expenditure to increase in the future.
These are the findings of a survey completed by the Association to find out just what the level of take up of eLearning is in Victoria in the “big end of town”.
“We surveyed just over 50 businesses representing ten percent of Victoria’s largest businesses.” said Stuart Tait, eLearning.org committee member. “We asked them on the products and services they used to support their training, how many people they reached, their budget on eLearning and what they saw as their future use of eLearning.”
“The process took longer than expected due to our need to reach the right people and sometimes a lack of awareness of eLearning. We are confident that the findings we obtained represent, if anything, a conservative estimate of an emerging level of activity and investment in the State.”
In addition to responses to our questions we also received a lot of informal feedback during the phone interviews. Comments included “What’s eLearning???” and “We are thinking about it. On the one hand it looks like the only way to meet our statutory obligations regarding OHS and the like, and on the other hand we don’t know where to start.”
Some respondents felt their workforce was too old to come to terms with new technologies and some thought that face to face PD was the only way to go. They felt that eLearning was just a fad. Others could not see any other way of providing training to the all of their staff (particularly in regional offices).
Survey findings extrapolated to the large business sector of Victoria include the following:
- Proportion of large businesses using eLearning: 51%
- Minimum number of people with access to eLearning: 358,000
- Estimated minimum total expenditure on eLearning: $159M
- Proportion of expenditure spent “in house”: 41%
- Proportion of expenditure outsourced to Victorian companies: 13%
- Proportion of expenditure outsourced to non-Victorian Australian companies: 10%
- Proportion expenditure spent overseas: 36%
- Proportion of companies who consider that their expenditure on eLearning will increase: 61%
The results indicate that many of the big consumers of eLearning produce their own eLearning products and almost half of these businesses are still to engage with eLearning.
Stuart concludes that, “The data points to an important role for the Association. Given that so much eLearning is developed in-house, the role of bringing practitioners together to share knowledge and skills is vital to our goal of making Victoria recognised as a centre of excellence for eLearning.”
