London (UK), November 2012 - ELIG, the European Learning Industry Group, has initiated a project to enable the workplace-learning industry to share its success stories of learning using technology. The aim of the project is to help change the way Europe learns by highlighting the powerful evidence hidden within individual stories and bringing them together as a collection of micro-stories to be shared to inspire others. Stories are from organisations that have measured the impact of their blended learning projects.
ELIG recognised that the workplace-learning industry is not always understood and has struggled to successfully demonstrate the potential impact that learning using technology can have on the success of an organisation. The stories highlight to business leaders that new ways of learning are already influencing business agility, competitive advantage, and improving the bottom line.
The initiative saw a broad range of organisations from a number of sectors coming together to compile an initial collection of stories. Over a six-month period in 2012, ELIG members were invited to vote on which of these stories showed the best business results and best diversity. The final top ten winning stories from this process were then compiled. These include stories from Ford, Ikea, Speexx, Caterpillar, The Columbian Government, The NHS, Boots, Cisco, Howdens, and Learndirect.
These top ten micro-stories are available for all on the ELIG website, and as a collection, they tell a powerful story of how the right kind of learning can contribute to an organisation's bottom line.
Richard Straub, Secretary General of ELIG, says, "Our key aim at ELIG is to be a catalyst for changing the way we learn in organizations. This collection of amazing stories demonstrates to leaders that they must take notice and recognise the power of learning technologies in their organisation and demand more from it. We have reached a tipping point where, for the first time in recent history, we have the means to create what used to be heralded as 'the learning organization before its time'. The intelligent blending of traditional formats, with multimedia and social media has the potential to finally achieve the step change that we have been aspiring to for the last decade."
ELIG encourages everyone to share and re-tell these stories through social media and the learning press and to take them to the organisations decision makers to show what learning - and in particular learning technologies - can do.
Laura Overton, Vice Chair ELIG Marketplace Group and Founder of Towards Maturity, adds, "Our own research with over 2200 businesses clearly shows that, used well, learning technologies are reducing time to competency, saving money, improving staff retention and motivation, and driving productivity. This ELIG initiative helps bring those benefits to life so that learning professionals across Europe can build more effective business cases for change."
Piers Lea, Chair of ELIG Marketplace Group and CEO LINE Communications says, "Senior policy makers and business leaders need to hear about the impact our industry is having. If they knew some of the great results, we would be seeing many more strategic implementations. The top ten has partly been selected on the sheer breadth of the situations in which learning technology has been applied. As an industry we are good with our case studies, but no one has time to read. This is a way of expressing the value of what we do as succinctly as possible. Now we need to spread the word!"
