What were the objectives of your research?

Willie Tafadzwa Chinyamurindi: South African human resources managers are faced with daunting challenges within their scope of operation, especially in the area of training. South Africa is facing a serious shortage of skills while on the other hand a high rate of unemployment prevails among the unskilled labour force. With this in mind, a need exists to build more cost-effective and efficient workplace learning environments to meet individual and organizational objectives, requiring organizations to educate and train employees.

Research from Europe demonstrates the existence of a gender divide towards the acceptance of technology that favours men over women. The purpose of the research was to investigate eLearning acceptance in the work place among a sample of employees.

Does a battle of the sexes still continue in the workplace? And if so, could you please give us some examples?

Willie Tafadzwa Chinyamurindi: In my view, the battle of the sexes in the workplace has taken a whole new dimension. Women are becoming more proactive and concerned about issues of their development. Women are also emerging as contenders for positions within the organization - subsequently crushing the male ego. As a result, you have many employees chasing after too few positions - the battle lines are now drawn. The winner at the end of the day is the skilled employee, and the function of training is thus pivotal as a way of ensuring the employees are skilled. The sexes are then locked in a fierce battle; professional inadequacies due to a lack of ICT competency in training will then knock a candidate out of contention in the battle.

My research showed no statistical differences. In essence, from the 191 employees in four companies in South Africa, women are equally as accepting of eLearning as men, and that is good news, especially in a developing country.

Based on the findings of your study, which implications can you conclude for African corporations?

Willie Tafadzwa Chinyamurindi: It was noted that to increase the effectiveness of eLearning in the workplace, it is important for users to perceive that the system is useful to enhance job performance or productivity. It was also noted that there is need to provide useful content that employs learning principles that can help enhance the learning experience and further encourage trainees to use eLearning once again. The eLearning system needs to be user-friendly to encourage perceived ease of use and usefulness for respondents.

As far as the construct of computer self-efficacy is concerned, the human resources practitioners in organizations using eLearning need to introduce training courses to increase familiarity with computing techniques and hence develop sufficient computer literacy to use the system.

The majority of males and females reiterated their commitment to use eLearning again as a medium of training. Factors that might encourage this would include the use of simple, clear, and concise learning content. Where the learning material is used on a global scale, organizations are encouraged to come up with relevant local content to facilitate the learning process within the African context because these factors may influence the behavioural intent of use.

Factors that may influence perceived ease of use would include disturbances happening within the organization. Training rooms and facilities need to be free from all disturbances that may impede the learning process. If the perceived ease of use is affected, this may have a bearing on trainee perceptions towards usefulness of the learning package.