://training via the desktop:// - Web-based training - includes related article on Strategic Group Inc's study on technology-based training

WEB-BASED TRAINING IS HELPING EMPLOYERS MAXIMIZE THEIR TRAINING DOLLARS - AND THEIR EMPLOYEES' TIME.

Like most hotel chains, Days Inn of America Inc. suffers enormous employee turnover - right around the hotel-industry average of 120 percent a year for hourly employees. "I can send my trainers out to work with a fresh reservations staff at a Days Inn, and within two or three months the entire staff can be completely new again and won't know the system," says Janet Jungklaus, Days Inn's director of training.

She adds that some employees leave out of frustration because they don't have the training to help them do their jobs well.

So how do you train an ever-changing workforce of 18,000 people at 1,800 locations worldwide with a budget limited to 11 trainers?

Days Inn thinks it has the answer: interactive web-based training, including instructor-led segments, to teach reservation operations, house-keeping duties, supervision and even specific skills such as dealing with surly guests. "The web is cost-effective," says Jungklaus. "It's more timely than the classroom, and because it's interactive, people have to be alert the whole time."

Days Inn is one of the first companies to use the Internet and corporate intranets to educate employees, distributors and others. A new generation of products is helping them deliver interactive audio and video to virtual classrooms, as well as manage enrollment, self-paced learning, testing and tracking.

TIME AND MONEY

Why the push for web-based training? The answers are cost savings, timeliness and efficiency.

"There's about a 50-percent reduction in time and cost over classroom training," says Brandon Hall, editor of Multimedia & Training Newsletter, which has assessed the return-on-investment (ROI) of technology-based training. Many early adopters of web-based training confirm his estimate, but they caution that up-front costs to buy hardware and to make existing content web friendly increase the overall outlay.

Although no ROI studies exist for the web per se, case studies and surveys of earlier technology-based instruction show that it costs about half as much as classroom training - although there is a large up-front cost. (See sidebar.) The anecdotal evidence from the early adopters of web-based training suggests that this new mode will save about the same amount once the materials are developed.

Although web-based training won't resolve every training issue, it does allow employees to get what they want, when they need it and at a convenient location - their desks, or even on a remote laptop. With increasingly dispersed workforces, that's a plus.

Scott Rosen, CEO of the Rosen Group, an HR consulting firm in Cherry Hill, NJ., says that many of his customers - mostly small emerging companies - want to use the web to deliver all kinds of training. "One of our clients has us looking into management and supervisory training for its workforce - at 10 or 12 locations - using the web," he says.

Early adopters also emphasize the efficiency of offering an hour-long curriculum of instructional modules that employees can use at their convenience, rather than scheduling and herding them into a classroom for training.

Also, they say that building instructor-led components into these web-based programs - at the beginning and periodically throughout the training - can give the learners necessary motivation and feedback from an expert.

DAYS INN

Days Inn pilot tested its web-based training this summer and plans to roll out a broader program by year's end. Head trainer Jungklaus hopes to hit 90 percent of the company's franchise properties by mid-1999 but says she'll be happy with even 50 percent.

One reason Days Inn can pursue this objective is a program recently launched by its parent company, Cendant Corp., the world's largest hotel company, to upgrade the technology at all its properties. Within a year, most Days Inn franchises will have Pentium-based desktop computers with CD ROM, sound, video and Internet capability.

Days Inn also benefits from an industry-wide effort, led by the nonprofit Education Institute of the American Hotel and Motel Association, to develop web-based training programs. Lowell Johnson, the institute's director of Internet operations, says demand for web-based training comes from the top.

"There are CEOs who want to be on the cutting edge," Johnson says. Using technology from the Interactive International Learning Corp., a Troy, N.Y.-based vendor, Johnson's staff is developing the kind of training programs that Jungklaus will use at Days Inn. Johnson says most of the material will be self-paced - something employees can do at their convenience - but it will also include important instructor-led segments.

Although much of the web-based training at Days Inn will be self-paced, Jungklaus anticipates that "80 percent will have an instructor-led component."

PIONEERS' EXPERIENCE

Unlike Days Inn, most early entrants into web-based training were technology companies already comfortable with the web. Pioneers include Bay Networks, a networking hardware company based in Santa Clara, Calif.; Cisco Systems Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based networking hardware company; and Sun Microsystems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based computer company. Many of these firms' first efforts are aimed at training the information technology staff in technical skills, teaching the workforce standard software applications and preparing sales people for new product launches.

Bay Networks, for example, already has roiled out pre-sales training in the United States using technology from Centra Software Inc., in Lexington, Mass. Using audio and a set of slides that resemble an interactive Power Point presentation, Bay Networks delivers highly technical information and instruction in its new networking products to the people who must sell them. The company plans to expand web-based training to include support engineers, technical support center staff and third-party distributors.

"We consider web-based training an adjunct to our existing offerings," says Steve Henry, Bay Network's director of education for North America. "Bay provides a variety of learning opportunities - CD ROM, web based and classroom - for students to select based on their availability and method of learning preference."

Henry has yet to do an ROI study, but he estimates the effort will save $350 per day per person in travel and accommodation costs. And, he adds, "None of the trainees is complaining about not having to travel."

LearnShare, LLC, a Toledo, Ohio-based consortium of 14 Fortune 500 companies that include General Motors Corp., Owens Corning and Levi Strauss, has just finished a prototype web-based curriculum. First-time supervisors will use it to learn skills such as running meetings, creating agendas and understanding customers. The Internet delivery system will include live chat sessions and e-mail to keep students in touch with a mentor. "We're finding a collaborative virtual classroom is much more effective than self-paced instruction alone," says Rick Corry, general manager and CEO of LearnShare.

Not everyone agrees that the so-called "soft" skills are appropriate for web-based training, however. Lee Klepinger, vice president of Wall Data Inc., a Kirkland, Wash.-based software developer, says he has no plans to move into the soft skills yet. "That's where human intervention is most effective," he says.

For now, Wall Data will stick to using the web to train sales staff and independent resellers in a new line of products that provide computer data over networks.

HR INVOLVEMENT

At Bay Networks, Cisco, Wall Data and elsewhere, business units - not HR departments - are driving the adoption of the new technology, mostly because business managers are in tune with its effect on the bottom line. "Eight hours of travel time and another eight hours of classroom time for a high-priced sales executive is a huge investment for training," says Mike Mitchell, Cisco's program manager in worldwide sales training.

When a business unit brings in web-based training, HR usually isn't far behind. At Wall Data, Pamela Pride, the HR vice president, is evaluating the potential for employee orientation and other training. "We've done some focus groups and the reception is quite positive," she says.

At Bay Networks, the HR department is about to roll out web-based employee orientation, but the Cisco HR department is taking a wait-and-see attitude. "There are some barriers," says Mark Walus, an organizational development specialist in HR. "The audience isn't ready. Managers have a hard time with it, especially in the area of leadership development." Walus says the HR department at Cisco will do some pilot testing at some point.

One reason HR people may fear web-based training is the perception that it will put trainers out of business. "You've just created an automated function where there were service people before," says Eliot Masie, founder of Masie Center, a consulting firm for corporate training in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "Some HR people look at this and gulp."

Not the pioneers, however. Days Inn's Jungklaus is ecstatic that the web will allow her to deploy 11 trainers, including herself, more effectively.

Rosen, a 10-year veteran of classroom instruction, believes HR people are leery of web-based training because of their general lack of technical acumen, and he cops to that himself. He urges HR professionals to partner with information technology staffs. "They have the technical expertise and we have the HR piece," he says.

TECHNOLOGY'S LEGACY

HR people also may be skittish because earlier technology-based instructional methods - such as CD ROM and computer-based training - have not panned out as well as expected, and the effectiveness of the material is uncertain. Web-based training may overcome that legacy of false promises with its ability to deliver a live, instructor-led segment. Even if it is restricted to audio, the instruction is much more active than CD ROM and computer-based training, which tend to dampen trainee motivation.

Although web-based distance training is new, Masie insists that it is not overhyped. "If you can deliver a percentage of training over corporate intranets to the desktop, that's a good thing," he says. "There's hardly an organization that doesn't buy it in theory."

Masie sees three obstacles to turning theory into practice. First, many companies will require systems upgrades. Second, there's no content specifically designed for the web, which is similar to but different enough from CD ROM, video and computer-based training to prevent a simple transfer.

But the biggest hurdle, says Masie, is lack of imagination. "It's a product that still has to be invented," he says. "Do people have the imagination to create something compelling on the web?"

Experts and pioneers agree that presentation of the material must be carefully thought out. In most cases, you cannot simply move workbooks, CD ROM or computer-based training content to the intranet. The web "requires quite a bit of rethinking of instructional design," cautions Robert Macfarlane, a senior instructor at Bay Networks Inc. Macfarlane is developing sales training programs that use a software product with audio.

"You're not an instructor standing up in front of a classroom, and you lose your visual cues," he says. "You're more like a disc jockey in a radio station. You are linked by aural cues, and silence equals distraction."

In the race to be imaginative, it would be pretty hard to beat Sun Microsystems, which is using the web to teach employees how to use a standard software package. Arjun Reddy, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based instructional design consultant who worked with Sun on the project, says that even a technologically advanced company such as Sun was uncomfortable about relying on its own network, desktop computers and the Internet to guarantee delivery of an audio feed.

So, for now at least, the company has redesigned instructional materials for the web. But when class time comes, the learners and their instructor link up over a conventional telephone line. "People might say we could have used better technology, but my answer is, we solved the problem with the time and resources we had," says Reddy. "And nobody has complained that this is a difficult way to learn."

RELATED ARTICLE: EXPENSES

Estimating Costs and Return on Investment

Strategic Solutions Group Inc., Annapolis, Md., recently issued a study of technology-based training. According to the study, the costs of setting up technology-based training, including the web-based variety, range as follows:

* Needs analysis - $5,000 to $10,000 in time spent analyzing the training needs and determining the optimal solution.

* Training design - $20,000 to $40,000. The higher end assumes you bring in outside consultants.

* Training development - $10,000 and higher per hour of training. Actual production of the material can range widely, depending on whether you are redesigning existing material for the web or developing brand-new material.

Strategic Solutions also created a hypothetical situation to calculate the cost of delivering training to 500 employees through the traditional classroom mode versus computer-based training. The hypothetical case assumes that 40 hours of classroom instruction equates to 24 hours of more-effective computer-based training.

In this example, the computer-based approach would save about 20 percent in the first year. In the second and later years the savings could approach 50 percent because initial development costs would not be incurred.

Computer-based training also can be delivered in less than half the time of traditional classroom training, a savings difficult to calculate in monetary terms.

Following are the results of the study:

[TABULAR DATA OMITTED]

Bill Roberts, a freelance writer based in Los Altos, Calif., covers business, technology and management issues. He can be reached at brobert1@ix.netcom.com.

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