During the recession that followed the burst of the dot com bubble, the corporate training world saw an overwhelming cut to their budgets (along with most other departments).  We all know the story — organizations that had been spending on expensive custom web-based training projects began looking for ways to meet their training objectives at a greatly reduced cost. Really, it’s the same story with every recession, and this the one we’re in the midst of one is shaping up to be no different. Training, as well as marketing, are two departments that get slashed immediately when really, it’s these two functions that companies should consistently invest in. But I digress.

Because of this economic bust in 2001, a new class of tools arose that saved companies money by enabling non-specialists to create serviceable but very bare bones eLearning courses. Often the idea was to enable the subject matter expert to create eLearning without needing assistance from instructional designers, writers, graphic artists and other professionals.

The result of course, were online training courses that were of low quality – frequently little more than PowerPoint-type static pages delivered over the Web — but learners accepted them because most had little to compare them with, expectations were low, and they kept training departments on budget. As the economy grew back, so did the training budgets, and therefore the emphasis has returned to the quality of eLearning. The problem now is that companies and third party eLearning developers have gotten used to the bevy of new, higher-end eLearning. How are companies to adjust back to static training when we’ve gotten used to a certain standard of eLearning.

The current recession promises to be much deeper, with training budgets being cut even more severely. Some analysts are estimating up to 25 percent. But with the benefits of eLearning now established – especially with regard to cost-of-delivery eLearning will often be the preferred method for any training that can’t simply be postponed. So long, of course, as it can be produced economically and quickly.

So the challenge in this recession will be how to deliver high-quality, effective eLearning, while dramatically reducing costs and resources. Aside from Flypaper, what other solutions will emerge that promise to deliver the same quality we’ve grown accustomed to, while helping companies stay within dramatically reduced training budgets?

- Don