Canon makes elearning available to 11,000 employees

Canon Europe is making elearning courses in IT and professional skills available to 11,000 employees across the Continent.

The courses, from Thomson NETg, are being delivered via Canon's learning management system (LMS) MyLearningZone, which has been in place for about a year.

'We already had around 60 bespoke courses on the system covering areas such as technical support of Canon's own products. We chose Thomson NETg to provide these more general courses because they were able to integrate them rapidly into our existing LMS,' said Canon's elearning manager Dominic Chiappe.

Approximately 300 additional courses were put onto the LMS during a two-week period last summer. These are being made available to employees in a variety of languages, one country at a time.

'Canon operates in around 60 countries throughout EMEA, but training policies vary by country. Some are fairly rigid with what they want to offer employees, while others are totally open and allow people to take any courses they want. The system gives us the flexibility for country managers to tailor which courses are made available and on what basis,' said Chiappe.

So far around 500 employees have made use of the online NETg courses, and Chiappe said they had been well received.

'We have a huge remote workforce and elearning makes training significantly more convenient for people who are a long way from central offices. They also find the interactive course content an engaging way to learn,' he said.

Not every country has yet made courses available and as the phased roll-out continues throughout this year, Chiappe expects take-up to increase significantly.

'The biggest demand is for the end-user IT courses. Previously all our IT training was classroom-based. Now we are using a blended approach,' he said.

But the vast majority of training at Canon remains classroom-based.

'Around 60 percent of courses are still delivered in the classroom. We try to guide people towards elearning as a first option, but we're not setting ourselves any targets because we don't want to alienate people by forcing them to learn in a way they may not want to,' said Chiappe.