It seems that the days in which employers look down on job candidates who earn their degrees through accredited online universities is coming to an end. According to a recent SHrM poll, “76 percent of human resources professionals said online degrees are viewed more favorably than five years ago.”

A major reason for this is due to the proliferation of the web in our ever day lives. In the past 10 years, the business world has changed before our very eyes (can you imagine an office setting without email?). It should come as no surprise that there is a direct positive correlation between the growth of the web and the acceptance of online learning.

Another reason employers are looking more favorably at online degrees is because of the use of online learning in the corporate environment. Companies have been investing heavily in custom Learning Management Systems and Learning Content Management Systems for some time now.

We here at Aspen Organization Development Consulting have seen the power the web can bring to a multitude of areas in business, not least of is employee training and development and organizational development. That’s why we launched Learning @…

Till now, small, emerging companies that do not have the budgets of their larger counterparts have forgone the benefits online learning tools can bring to the party. However, with a tool like Learning @… even the smallest company can do things such as:

• Deliver key messages from management
• Provide employee performance information
• Share company policies and procedures
• Host an online learning resources library
• Publicize company learning events and seminars
• And, probably most importantly, deliver online training courses

If you haven’t taken a look at our landing pages yet, I encourage you to do so. Check them out here: www.learning-at.com. And be sure to sign-up for our complimentary newsletter to see how Learning @… can benefit you employees and organization.

A current article on SHrM.org details the necessity for companies to invest in their employees and lists some worrying trends in financial industry.

The article notes that many banks and financial organizations who have been hit hard by the current economic recession are cutting corners by not investing in their current employees. When I use the word “investing,” I am specifically referring to employee training and development. As the economy begins to improve, employees will begin to feel restless and ready to emerge from this economic winter and spread their proverbial wings other organization;s that is, unless companies take the time and money to provide training opportunities so that they may develop their business acumen skill sets and transition into higher roles within the company.

Theresa Minton-Eversole, author of the article Retention’s Business Case for Banking Industry Training, Study Shows, states, “U.S. banks spend an average of just $650 per employee on training, while successful companies in other industries spend an average of $1,100 per employee, according to a recently released talent management study conducted by the American Bankers Association (ABA) and the Corporate Executive Board (CEB). A survey of more than 3,500 bank CEOs asked about their organization’s talent management practices revealed that while banks fill 60 percent of their openings from within, 40 percent of responding bank CEOs believe that they are not doing enough to help their employees grow. Respondents said they believe that this is hurting succession planning.” These are worrying statistics.

As an organizational leader and/or a Human Resources manager, it is important to balance the company’s need to develop its employees while also being mindful of financial cost; after all, we’re not totally out of the economic woods yet. This is where a tool like Learning @… can help: not only is it a robust online employee learning application that can deliver customized training and development modules, it is a cost-effective system that employees can access 24/7, over and over again—all it requires is a user name and password.

A recent article, Desperate Job Seekers Push Relocation Rate to Three-Year High, on the SHrM website reveals that 18.2 percent of people polled would be willing to “pack-up-shop” and move some where else for a job opportunity.

According to John A. Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, the group who conducted the survey, “Job seekers had been extremely reluctant to relocate up until this most recent quarter…The reluctance was almost certainly related to the inability to sell one’s current home without incurring significant losses. There was also the fear that, with the job market so unstable, it was too risky to relocate for a job that might not last.”

As the article explains, though we have not climbed back to our pre-recession economic stability, workers who have been out of the office for such an extended period of time are willing to take the risk of relocating for distant job opportunities.

This obviously has a huge impact on the the lives and families of the employees. But what about the organizations onboarding these new workers? With an influx of new employees from different geographical locations, companies must ensure that they can successfully integrate many new people from different cultures and backgrounds into an established organizational culture.

A great approach to ensure success is to use a tool like Learning @… Here are three 4 ways in which a Learning @… package can significantly ease the integration process of new employees into a company:

1. Easily deliver the mission, vision, values, and goals of the organizations so that all new employees can be on the same page as established employees. As a new employee, it’s difficult to know what to work for and how to go about doing it if nobody tells you. In addition to having a centralized place that employees can read this information—a human resources executive or the president of the company can record a welcome message to employees in which he/she can detail what is expected of new employees.
2. Host an online orientation session. Why conduct multiple orientation sessions if you have multiple groups of new employees joining the organization. With Learning @… you can host an online training orientation session which new hires can visit multiple times—a sure fire way to help them absorb important new hire information.
3. Host an online policies and procedures section that allows new employees to access the rules and regulations of the organization. It’s hard to expect new hires to abide by the “law of the land” if they ignorant of it.
4. Host a cultural awareness online training module for your current employees. If a new employee is coming from a distant area, their cultural background and values may differ from those of a more homogeneous cultural atmosphere. Giving current employees the opportunity to learn and develop skills for cultural sensitivity in the workplace will ultimately allow for a more cohesive office environment.

Helping to integrate new employees into a distant organization is just one more example of Learning @…’s powerful, cost-effective functionality.

According to a recent study by Towers Perrin, many employees feel that the efficiency of their organization’s has plummeted in the past several months.  In an article posted on the SHrM website, Max Caldwell, a managing principal of Towers Perrin, notes, “Companies are easing up on the frequency and intensity of their messages about workplace efficiency; employees might feel underutilized as customers’ deflated purchasing power has caused demand to diminish; and costs and management layers often are cut without aligning the organizational structure or processes accordingly.”

An easy way to avoid these feelings of being underutilized is to foster a culture of corporate and personal efficiency. This process is two-fold. First, the organization must ensure that they are in fact acting in an efficient manner by aligning their business practices to the times (i.e.—if operating during an economic recession, cut costs by allowing employees to work from home or institute a four day work week). Second, consistently and directly communicate with employees about the companies progress, goals, vision, and need for efficiency. The communication aspect is key, both in the short and long term, because it will instill the need for efficiency among the troops.

Of course efficiency is not the only message employers need to deliver to their employees. Communication is king in an organization and the more resources available to a company the better. Learning @… provides such communication power as it is a web based organizational learning application, which employees may access anywhere they have internet access (that includes the web browser on a mobile phone!). An online employee learning tool such as Leaning @… allows organizations to communication their short and long term goals to their workforce and provides everyone with the opportunity to nurture the culture of efficiency.

On the Society for Human Resources Management (SHrM) homepage, there is currently a great article, written by an affiliate from India—Rekha Bajaj—that details the importance of “upskilling”, otherwise known as self-improvement, in times of economic turmoil. Bajaj notes, “Upskilling is the basis for evolution and if the workforce does not evolve with the demands of the market [come companies] could be the next dinosaurs.”

This insightful point is all the more poignant during times of economic recession when competition for the scant few jobs remaining on the market is at it’s highest.

But how do organizations promote upskilling among their workforce? After all, employees can’t be expected to intrinsically know that they should improve their skills in order for their employer to survive a tough economic climate; many employees are set in their ways and may feel that the best way to prove their worth to the organization is to do what they to best. As Bajaj points out, open communication is the answer.

There are numerous ways to promote open communication within an organization including:

• Stating and adhering to an open door policy in the employee handbook
• Holding regular meetings where employees can speak openly (at least in a professional manner)
• Leveraging technology to communicate company policies, procedures, expectations, vision, etc.

It’s on this last point i’m going to expand because this is where I will segue to Learning @…, the subject of this blog. Learning @… is the perfect tool for organizations to build the open communication necessary for managers to express and detail the vision and mission of the organization, which may have drastically altered in the face of a new economic reality, and then provide the online training for them to “upskill” and work towards achieving that vision and mission.

I really encourage you to read the article on SHrM (unfortuneately you need a SHrM membership in order to read. Ironic given the subject of this post. If you have a membership, the article’s title is Upgrading for an Upturn: Training Encouraged for Greater Mobility.) When you are finished reading, take a look at the features of the Learning @…Professional and let me know if you agree with my assessment—I hope you see the connections that I do.