Mission E-Possible: The Cisco E-Learning Story

Training & Development, Feb, 2001 by Patricia A. Galagan

Baumert is clearly jazzed about working on an e-learning project of this scale. "It's an Internet application that will grow. It's an exciting mix of technology and content, and it can help solve business problems. So, I'm excited to come to work every day."

Rocky road

All is not smooth on the road to e-learning, even at Cisco, where conditions make it likely to prosper. The ILSG must continually prove that e-learning works and why.

"Everyone wants to know how much you save with e-learning," says Metz, "but the important discussion is what are the things you can do once you have the infrastructure installed that you simply couldn't do in the old model."

Cisco acquires a new partner company on average once every two-and-a-half weeks. Before the Field E-learning Connection established a primary source for learning, account managers had to consult hundreds of internal Websites and wade through piles of email to keep up with acquisitions information. Now the acquisitions page on the Field E-Learning Connection has one of the highest hit rates of any page on the portal.

Before the Field E-Learning Connection existed, salespeople spent days in training away from their customers, peers, and managers, so online learning was a pretty obvious benefit from a time standpoint. But to test how e-learning would work compared to classroom training, the field e-learning team studied 200 resellers taking a certification course. Half attended live classes and labs and took part in study groups. The other half took their training online and used remote labs and online discussion groups. All were tested at the end: The e-learners had a 10 percent better pass rate than the classroom learners.

"The real benefit," adds Metz, "came in the opportunity savings. The classroom learners were out of pocket for a week, away from customers and co-workers. The online learners fit their learning into the valleys of their schedules and experienced little or no hit to business productivity."

There have been substantial savings from e-learning programs at Cisco, especially in manufacturing, the site of one of the most aggressive skunk works. Assembly line workers haven't seen a classroom since 1999; they have access to e-learning right on the factory floor. The result was savings of $1 million per quarter in improved process, and an 80 percent increase in speed to competence.

Another e-learning coup for that unit involved training for ISO 9000 registration. For its initial registration three years earlier, Cisco budgeted $1.4 million for classroom training. In late 1999, it spent less than $20,000 for the training delivered online, with better results measured as fewer inconsistencies with ISO standards. And while the ISO readiness program achieved 100 percent participation across a user community of 6,000 manufacturing and customer service employees, internal e-learning implementation took only four weeks from concept to global execution.

"People like to argue that e-learning isn't as effective as the classroom," says Tom Kelly, "but how effective is the classroom? Most of us know that classroom teaching produces about a 25 percent retention rate in the first 10 days, with a decline in skill if you don't use it.