Exactly one year ago, SkillSoft commissioned the first major benchmarking study on the status of e-learning in major UK organisations.
At that time, the company wanted to understand the trends and dynamics shaping the e-learning market and predict how it might develop in the years ahead.

The study was carried out by Taylor Nelson Sofres, and went on to become the benchmark by which organisations measured their adoption of e-learning against the rest of their sector and the UK as a whole.

Recently, SkillSoft retained the services of Taylor Nelson Sofres to repeat the survey. The aim? To establish what changes in training and development had occurred since the study was last conducted, and determine the current dynamics now influencing the strategies and policies of those responsible for employee development.

Overall, the results were broadly in line with what SkillSoft International was actually expecting.

The rate of adoption for e-learning has continued to grow. Of the 2002 sample, 46% of companies had adopted some form of e-learning (an increase of 12% on 2001). That said, perhaps more significant is the fact that 78% of those organisations questioned said that they'd be using e-learning to develop the skills of their staff in the next two years.

The range of skills that organisations are developing using e-learning are varied and numerous. Those we questioned mentioned in excess of 20 curricula areas, including: customer services skills, finance, Human Resources, quality management and sales and marketing (to name but a few). There is also unequivocal evidence from these results that, as a method of delivery, e-learning is proving extremely effective at developing business-critical skills and improving the performance of employees – the impact of which is felt throughout the fabric of the organisation.

A significant number of the respondents point to a real return on investment from e-learning, having realised true business benefits from implementing the medium. They have seen a positive impact on employee retention, the quality and cost of critical business processes and even a positive impact on sales, revenue and (in some cases) share performance. And that's in addition to savings made over more traditional learning and educational tools.

For those organisations that implemented e-learning to achieve greater employee efficiency, over 80% claimed that their expectations were met. For those who wanted to improve employee retention (a big problem in the security sector, of course), over 64% said those expectations were actually exceeded.