Pilkington sees the way to online learning

Glass maker Pilkington has signed a £380,000 three-year contract to supply online training to its 24,000-strong workforce following a successful pilot.

Online learning provider SkillSoft will provide management, business, health and safety, IT and desktop skills training to the global manufacturer.

Pilkington says the business, management and technical skills of its workforce is critical to success, and the company wanted a cost-effective and consistent global approach to learning.

‘As a manufacturer, we are very lean. There is not a massive infrastructure for training and development, and elearning is a way of providing quality training,’ said Roy Prescott, group learning and development manager for Pilkington.

The elearning will be deployed via SkillSoft’s learning management system, SkillPort, and will be accessible online. Content will be available in several languages, including Spanish, Polish and Mandarin.

Prescott says the success of the six-month trial was critical to signing the contract, following service and deployment issues with a previous elearning provider.

During the trial Pilkington had over 500 new registered users and more than 700 completed programmes.

‘Previously, we chose internal hosting which proved problematic. The elearning system was sharing servers with other applications around the world and Java script was a particular problem. In some countries, parts of the programme never got off the ground,’ said Prescott.

Now Pilkington has a single global IT organisation and has standardised on Microsoft Office XP 2003.

‘It is very centralised and we have standardised operating systems, but we decided to choose external hosting as it is easier and employees have access from home,’ said Prescott.

He says the success of elearning depends on management support.

‘Local management support is utterly critical and you’ve got to keep reminding them about elearning, but it has got to be driven locally, as elearning must be integrated with the local management systems and culture,’ said Prescott.