In the modern organisation there is hardly anybody that does not need to learn "something about something", so the market for learning management software is growing very fast.

"The economics of web-based training are compelling," says Dave Mandelkern, chief technology officer at Docent, a leading vendor. "It reduces travel and material distribution costs and delivers content that is always up-to-date."

Mr Mandelkern believes that e-learning will be more successful than the computer-based training (CBT), which preceded it, because it requires only a web browser with standard multimedia extensions. CBT was more difficult to deploy, requiring a compact disk player and proprietary software to be installed on each desktop computer.

The learning management software market does not provide the training content, but the complete infrastructure required to use it. This includes user profiles, skills assessment, registration, content delivery, training resource management, examination, and so on. A critical element is correlation tools that connect the learning activities with the organisation's core business systems in order to show the business impact of learning activities.

"The training manager cares about the traditional learning metrics of hours per employee or dollars per employee," says Mr Mandelkern. "However, chief executives only care about how training has impacted revenue, costs, market share or customer satisfaction."

These tools will demonstrate whether a salesman sells more product or the call centre agent answers calls more quickly. "By measuring business activity we can show a minimum 400 per cent return on investment," claims Mr Mandelkern.

Content can be delivered by a link to third-party websites with which the organisation has a contract. Some of these provide no feedback and others use industry standard interfaces that send back data on the employees' progress and results to the learning management systems.

According to Mr Mandelkern, 70 per cent of content is typically developed by internal content developers or end users. They use familiar office productivity tools, such as word processing or graphics packages, or commonly used web authoring tools. The learning management system lets them interactively structure it and add navigation without having to do any programming.

Although most content is run directly from the web, in low bandwidth environments it can be combined with a compact disk for audio and video that does not change frequently. Synchronisation software also allows learning material to be downloaded to a portable computer and the progress and results uploaded to the server later.

Mr Mandelkern explains that the "sweet spot" in the market has historically been in customer facing applications, such as training customers, distributors, resellers, sales, customer support and field service personnel. "That tends to be the 'highest bang for your buck'," he says, "because they radically affect revenue, as well as reducing the cost of customer support and field service."

E-learning is now spreading to manufacturing to improve the quality of products, to human resources for basic skills training and for employee training in topics like filling in travel expenses.

The use of e-learning for formal qualifications varies by industry. In the financial services and pharmaceuticals industries it is nearly 100 per cent, because of the regulatory requirements. In high technology it is only 15-20 per cent, which is mainly certification programmes for resellers.

If employees undertake external training for their own benefit, the software will still track how effective it is to determine if it should be made more widely available. The employee's complete learning profile can also be captured in one place, and Mr Mandelkern believes this will ultimately be portable between employers.

The concept of learning is changing from a course, consisting of 20 minutes to an hour of continuous material, to a "learning object," which may be a few seconds to a few minutes of material. Mr Mandelkern believes this move to increasingly unstructured content will blur the distinction between formal learning and knowledge management systems, with the same content being accessed in a variety of different ways.

A new employee might access a series of learning objects through a very structured series of courses designed to explain the company and its products. Alternatively, an existing employee might use one of those same 30-second learning objects to help them to solve a particular problem.

The other big trend that Mr Mandelkern anticipates is collaborative creation of knowledge for sharing, with users of the system creating knowledge objects themselves in order to share best practice. The best sales executive at selling a particular product into a particular industry could share what they have learned with the rest of the sales force.

"In three to five years all content will be created using voice mail, or a digital camcorder with a connection to a laptop," he says. "The sales executive just records himself and it doesn't require any complex production or even editing. It changes the way you create content from content specific authoring tools into generic ways of managing digital information."

The mobile internet

Mr Mandelkern is very excited about the potential of the mobile internet for delivering learning objects. "A large number of workers who need knowledge do not have a fixed location with an internet connection," he says. "It could be a mechanic working under the wing of an aircraft or the doctor in the hospital who needs to learn something quickly."

A sales executive could use a mobile device to say that they are visiting a particular type of customer using a particular product and ask how they should position their product against it. They could immediately be sent a series of bullet points that they can remember during the call.

A lot of Docent's customers are tying the e-learning systems in to their incentive and reward systems. In some respects traditional classroom training has been a reward in itself, but employees need more encouragement to use online learning.

"The market for e-learning is huge and the economics are compelling for the customer," concludes Mr Mandelkern. "That makes it very exciting because it will be as big as the ERP or CRM waves. In the next ten years we expect e-learning companies to emerge that are as large as SAP or Siebel."