Businesses find training to be an enormous expense. By investing in good training software, they can cut that expense dramatically. Too see this in action, let's consider an example.
Andersen Consulting devotes a great amount of resources towards training their employees; nearly 7% of payroll in recent years. They do so much training that it has been worth their while to purchase a defunct college in the suburbs of Chicago and convert it into a dedicated training center. Every year, they send thousands of employees from around the world to courses at this center. One of the most widely-attended courses, Business Practices School, is annually attended by over 4,000 consultants. This school provides a five-day overview of business practice issues important to Andersen and their clients. Each consultant who takes the course needs to spend between 60 and 80 hours in self-guided student before even beginning the five days of formal classes in Chicago.
Andersen recognized the large expenditures they were making and decided to ask the Institute for the Learning Sciences, of which they are the founding sponsor, for help. ILS helped convert Business Practices School into an interactive computer-based training course. This conversion halved the time the course required while improving its quality. This change has not only saved Andersen over $10 million in travel, lodging, teaching, and billable time lost from the time spent away from client sites, but has helped business lessons to be delivered at a more individual level. By converting the lecture based instruction to Goal-Based Scenarios and realistic simulations, Andersen's consultants now learn the underlying information more thoroughly and retain it better.
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