BT ready to develop elearning platform

£1.5m contract will help to tailor staff training

BT is poised to sign a £1.5m elearning deal to centralise the management of electronic training for staff.

The telecoms giant is in negotiations with supplier SumTotal to buy an elearning management platform, to create and manage courses tailored to 100,000 employees over the BT intranet.

‘The platform is designed to provide the same elearning system across BT,’ said BT organisational learning manager Peter Kelly.

‘We have a number of systems at the moment, which have proved difficult to evolve. The new one will offer much more control over the whole learning, authorisation and document management process.’

BT relies on a number of systems to control the access, availability and flow of training course content, including one that it shares with, and is managed by, Accenture as the result of a previous arrangement.

The new system will be rolled out in phases during 2006, and will allow BT to increase divisional access and control over the tailoring of course content, as well as link to security permission systems held in its PeopleSoft human resources database.

‘It will enable us to do a number of things with more functionality, such as allowing for more downloadable content. It will also give us live classrooms, and pick-and-mix blending of training resources,’ said Kelly.

‘All the content can be corporately badged, but administered locally in terms of adding or updating new content.’

The system will build on BT’s growing reliance on elearning, with 70 per cent of all training now delivered electronically.

The company will use the new platform to build on the £12m it saves on its £50m-plus annual training budget, by reducing the cost of having to provide equivalent courses that are instructor and classroom-based.