1. Define Clear Objectives
If you don’t know where you want to go any road could take you there. This applies to eLearning Outsourcing equally well. If you are not clear about what you want from a particular eLearning project you can be sure no one else is either. The vendor will often create a sketchy picture of your goals and try and achieve that. That’s NOT what you want.

• Use well defined Statements of Work when outsourcing eLearning projects.  Detail the vendors’ and your responsibility as accurately as possible.
• Define the ‘level’ of output by using reference of previous projects (your or vendor’s). If you can add more details good. Just agreeing to something like ‘Level 2 output’ is fuzzy and will create confusion later.
• Study and understand the Project Scope Documents and Design Documents well before you sign them off. If you don’t understand them your vendor will be happy to walk you through the documents.
• Include any specific goals your senior management has from the program and articulate that for the vendor development team and yourself. If these come in late in the development cycle costs will escalate and timelines are sure to be affected.

2. Follow Process
You’ve checked the vendor’s process documents & maturity models and how they’ll work for your projects when you selected them. Now it’s time to allow the vendor to conform to that process and those models,  and for you to emulate them yourself. There are times when deadlines are advanced, and you may be tempted to skip that prototype stage. Skipping an earlier stage comes at cost – the quality or delivery dates suffer due to endless modifications and rework. Apart from the additional cost, it would also mean frustration for the development team. You need to stand by and conform to the process in the best interest of your project.

It’s very important to understand your role in the project process. Reviews & feedback on the many deliveries you receive along the way need time commitment from you. A Common mistake clients make is to assume it is a simple task and can be done quickly. Have someone capable & experienced to do that work. I suggest you check with your vendor during the kick-off stage about the time based project needs and at which stages. A day’s delay from your end could sometimes lead to more than a day’s delay from vendor’s end especially if you are not working with a dedicated team at the vendor.

3. Get the Communication Right
On outsourced projects sometime communication can become more important than the actual deliveries themselves. We’ve heard clients complaining that the lack of information bothers them more than the missed deliveries. At most times they feel confident of handling the situation if timely information is available about the status of the project rather than find out at the 11^th hour about deliveries being missed or delayed. But that’s something any responsible vendor should do.

It is important to setup proper communication channels and keep them open to create an environment of confidence & trust between your own team and the vendor’s development team. Signed off specifications documents and approved prototypes should not necessarily hold you from having discussions on new ideas that may emerge. Also provide constructive feedback whenever there’s an opportunity. This tends to prompt the vendor to commit even more to your project.

If you are working with a vendor on multiple projects have periodic review discussions to evaluate how the relationship is going. Iron out any persistent issues in the processes or otherwise. Be forthcoming in resolving your side of issues too.

4. Define and Measure Quality
Like beauty quality is subjective too.
While a sense of ‘quality’ should emerge from your defined objectives you still need to clearly spell out what you mean by quality. Understand your team’s and management’s collective expectation about quality and make sure your vendor knows and understands them clearly. Ensure to list individual details about features, elements and any other specifics of the program that you consider a part of good or acceptable quality. For instance some clients consider the amount of animation and interactivition to be an indicator of high quality while others don’t.

Quality is what TRULY affects the outcomes of the program in a real sense. A good quality product will have the intended learning impact on the audience. I suggest you focus on what the learners are supposed to ‘do’ or ‘perform’ after the program and whether that’s being achieved by the program.  While you may add several bells and whistles to an eLearning course, the core has to be solidly focused around achieving that single most important objective. The cost of bad eLearning is much higher than you think.

It’s a good idea to define the quality assessment criteria for a program and approve checklists the vendor will use for testing. This will the development team give output that’s closer to your expectations and will eventually require less number of iterations.

5. Think Long Term
As your organization grows, you will probably outsource eLearning projects more. Every time you work with a new vendor it’s a learning experience for both the teams as they come to understand each other and their unique working culture and style. After working together on a few projects the communication and understanding between the teams reaches a level where projects start to flow smoothly. It just does not make sense to switch vendors every now and then. Think of your vendor as a possible long term partner from the very beginning. Invest in building their understanding of your organization, how it functions, and what’s the short term and long term goals; the returns will be well worth the effort.

If you work with an innovative vendor, it helps your team to develop new thoughts and skills too. This in turn could help you sell your services better internally or to external clients. Encourage discussions with your vendor to explore advances in the field and how you could take advantage of them.

One way to greater involvement is to revamp the engagement model with your vendor from being just a ‘cost-reduction’ or ‘staff-augmentation’ option towards becoming a ‘strategic-partner’. Getting formal engagement model agreement in place helps vendor commit resources and energy to think about advancements for your organization holistically rather than just work on a per project basis. Think business performance improvement & strategic capability building beyond cost savings.

Lastly I feel you should remember that your partner needs to be profitable to remain in business for the long term and be a suitable strategic partner. Don’t splurge but be ready to pay for experience and expertise.

I believe these five keys can you help you reap the benefits of eLearning outsourcing to the fullest.

1. Don’t create a course until it is really necessary and useful.
2. Write activities in which a character faces a realistic scenario.
3. Put the information outside the course.
4. Use the course to show how to use the job aids.
5. Let the activities, not the content, drive the design.

I believe this approach could be really useful to design eLearning courses on budget. The key is to not compromise on analysis and design phase. Reduction in fancy media and cutting down on unnecessary information is better.

Take a look at the videos below.

Click To Enlarge The Image

Earlier this year I had mentioned about Ambient Insight’s report on global self based eLearning market forecast. That report put the world market in 2009 at $27.1 billion making US the biggest market with a huge 60% share of world market.

As one of the comments there suggested training is seen as a cost-center in most organizations it is only natural to look for something cheapest.

I don’t intend to mean that you can’t find effective eLearning solutions that are cheaper than others, but yes if the focus is to find the cheapest solution, chances  are you overlook some other  (and I must say) more important parameters. It is certainly possible to work with limited budgets and still create good eLearning. You just need to know which areas to spend the scanty budgets you have. Not necessary to show a 3D simulation for negotiation skills. The solution needs to engage the mind, encourage reflection, and induce behavior change. Rather than dazzle the learner with slick animations and out of the world FX.

It would good to look at it from a different angle. Do you know the cost of bad eLearning? I think bad eLearning is much costlier than good eLearning. Let’s look at some examples:

Cost of bad health and safety training for the workforce?

Cost of bad clinical analysis training for doctors?

Cost of bad sales training?

If you buy eLearning on ‘the cheaper the better’ basis, you would do well to consider what would be the impact on your organization if that eLearning fails or does not result in desired learner behavior or performance. You will be surprised!

As an industry, eLearning has witnessed significant growth over the past years. Then the recession hit and not only did it disrupt the continuity of growth and momentum in the industry, but as I see it, even when fading away it poses another threat to eLearning industry. I will explain how.

If the only thing the last 15 months or more of the cruel downturn has taught more companies than anything else, it is the need to be cautious on cash (and costs) front. Tremendous pressures were put on companies to save on costs (and continue even now, while a little milder) and more so to generate more value at the same cost. These pressures led organizations to react in varied ways – downsizing, rightsizing, blanket budget cuts, even training cost cutting, across the board salary revisions, etc. On one hand while the pressure to reduce costs kept on increasing and still is a reality, on the other there was also a burning need to upskill and reskill employees to generate more value and productivity.

This mix of cost pressure and need to still keep an eye on training to survive and grow beyond the recession phase, in my belief, started the second wave of adoption of eLearning. Over the past few years, as the industry was maturing, the focus was slowly, but firmly, moving towards producing learning solutions that impact performance and dollar numbers, this second wave could have a pull-back effect, potentially.

In the last few months (6 to 9 months) we (as a solutions provider) have seen an increase in inquiries focused on adopting eLearning primarily to compensate for the budget cuts and to reduce overall training costs. This is where my concern stems from. There are cases where the customers are looking for something quick, dirty and of course inexpensive. That these cases are increasing in number is a matter of concern, primarily for two reasons:

1. If such demand keeps increasing (and I believe as effects of the recession continue to get milder it will) there could be a surge in solutions which are good from a cost perspective but not from a ‘learning’ perspective. This could undermine or distract from the progress and advancements the industry is making in coming out with innovation and solutions to enhance learning in self-paced environments.
2. As more such solutions sell it would take another level of effort to evangelize and educate customers on the true value and potential of eLearning. This seems like going back a few good years and that isn’t good.

While I am confident that the recession is definitely proving and will continue to prove a booster in terms of revenue growth for learning solutions providers, I am also worried that it has the potential to erode the true value to some extent.

The bright side is that more companies are now able to produce excellent quality eLearning at costs lower than before and will still be able to offer good value at low cost striking the right balance. However a challenge still remains on the other front. How big this challenge will be only time can tell. As a company that provides high quality solutions we are pushing Innovation and development to ensure that we don’t fall into the trap (for the lack of a better word).

I’d love to hear more about this and how others feel about this situation. I’d really like to hear and conclude (hopefully) that most of my concerns are unfounded.

Key highlights (as shared in the executive summary are):

-  North America will continue to be the biggest market

-  By 2014 Asia (which includes Australia and New Zealand in this report) would overtake Western Europe to become the second largest market after North America. The compound annual growth rate in Asia is a very healthy 33.5%

-  East Europe is second fastest in growth terms at 23.0%. Vibrant outsourcing hubs have come up in countries such as Belarus and the Ukraine.

-  There is resistance in regional markets to content that has been translated but not localized. This is creating demand for local content in each region.

-  There’s virtually no self-paced eLearning being used in primary and secondary education in Japan, proving that it is a ‘myth’ to assume technologically advanced regions are more likely to adopt self-paced eLearning. In contrast 100% of primary and secondary schools in Korea and Singapore offer some type of online education.

-  Adoption of self-paced eLearning is now wide spread across buying segments. North America where corporate are still the top buyers, will see academic buyers emerge as top buyers in next five years

-  New tool and learning platform suppliers are entering the market at a steady rate in each region even in more mature markets like North America.

Growth Rates by Region (Source: Ambient Insight)

You can download the executive summary here.

So, how to select a vendor for elearning outsourcing?
I my view, to make an informed decision when selecting a vendor, one should evaluate a potential vendor on four counts – capability, credibility, costs & continuance. Below are my thoughts on each of these.

CAPABILITY
An eLearning development vendor should have eLearning as its core (if not the primary) business. To evaluate capability you should:

1. Review their website not just from the design but also from the content point of view. Also, check their blog (don’t disqualify if they don’t have one). This will give you some idea on their views and knowledge on eLearning.
2. Check work samples to evaluate the quality of their output. Samples can provide insights into their expertise in learning design & development. To get a good idea of a vendor’s overall skills, check as many samples as possible – minimum being 10. It is even better to ask for samples from your domain (Pharma, Construction etc.) and of the level / type (scenario based, video based etc.) of solution you are planning.
3. Ask for profiles of development team members who may work on your project. You would be better off to have employees (as against vendor’s contractors) working on your projects. For a small business you may even want to check profiles of the owners / promoters of the business.
4. Understand their development processes and see how well would they work with your setup. An eLearning development process should be mature & flexible enough to accommodate the iterative nature of eLearning content development. Beware: Process written in process documents could be very different from that put in practice. Ask the vendor to substantiate the process with documents from some past projects.
5. Ask how many projects have they delivered and how varied have these projects been. A team that has delivered large number of projects usually has richer experience to contribute to your project and can even handle unexpected situations. Additionally, large number of projects helps in smoothening of development processes by incorporating learning from past experiences.
6. Understand their working style. Know how they communicate and collaborate with clients on live projects, their office timing, team availability during emergencies, usage of web-based system to help keep track of various projects etc.  (A web-based project tracking system is extremely helpful if you are planning to have multiple projects running simultaneously and / or will have multiple people at your end coordinating with the vendor teams.)
7. Ask about their LMS & standards competencies. An in-house team of experts on this helps a great deal when integrating courses into new systems. You may like to check the different LMS systems have they integrated courses with and how they test and certify compliance.
8. Finally, enquire about what all they would NOT DO. For things they don’t do themselves, do they have any partners in place. If yes, what is their capability and credibility?

CREDIBILITY
To evaluate credibility you may want to:

1. Check how long have they been in business. In today’s economic scenario, especially the last 12-18 months, anyone who has survived 4-5 years should be reasonably stable. You may still want to do a financial review to be absolutely sure that the company is profitable and hence stable.
2. Speak with some of their long-term customers. This should tell you a lot about how well the vendor manages its customers in the long run and if they have been able to deliver value over that period of time.
3. Enquire if the vendor is willing to do a small, free/discounted ‘proof of concept’ project for you. It does require some efforts from your end, but, more importantly, it helps in eliminating the wrong vendors who might be looking alright otherwise.
4. See if the vendor has won any awards or any other recognition. Not all awards are the same, but winning some recognition always adds to the credibility.

COSTS
It is obvious you seek cost advantages when considering outsourcing. However, ‘cheaper the better’ is not always the best philosophy. Ultimately, your solutions need to deliver on their promise. What you need to be looking for is the cost to quality ratio. While evaluating past samples ask for actual costs of those samples too. Most often you would be told of costs in units of ‘dollar per learning hour’. You would need to bring down the parameters to be able to compare apples with apples. Even better way would be to provide scope of work and point to a reference output and ask the competing vendors to quote on that basis.

CONTINUANCE
While you select one or two vendors based on above criteria, you may want to ensure longer term association with a good vendor. There is cost and risk involved in switching a vendor and it is best if avoided. Hence, as a final safeguard you may want to:

1. Check if the vendor can grow (in volume of work) if you wish to increase business with them.
2. Ask how they keep up with latest trends in their domain. Ideally you should be looking out for some signs of continuous improvement or innovation setup within the company. After all, they need to help you with cutting-edge solutions in future too.

Hope these points help you select the best vendor for you needs. If you would like to add some more tips on this topic, we would love to hear from you.

This post deals with the benefits of eLearning outsourcing.

Why outsource?

Significant cost advantages
Undoubtedly, this is one of the key reasons for you to even consider outsourcing. Outsourcing arrangements enable you to reduce fixed costs and leverage the scalability of the service providers. This study by Bersin Associates – Offshore eLearning: What Works, estimates savings between 20-40% by outsourcing to India. It could be even more in some cases. Whether you are a corporate or a training company, you could gain from outsourcing (parts or full) projects to India. Of course you would need to choose a good vendor (I will discuss how to do that in a subsequent post).

Scalability without headaches
Outsourcing could help your team to be scalable – on demand. You could engage a team of 5 or 50 or 500 depending on your needs without having to worry about hiring, retention, firing etc. The vendor would manage everything including their training and providing replacement resources. This is hugely important for smaller companies given the kind of business environment we find ourselves in. It also helps in starting projects quickly, ramping up the team much faster, sometimes even putting the project on hold without much additional costs.

Better quality through innovation
Your eLearning vendor is better placed to deliver better quality – assuming you selected a good vendor to start with – on a consistent basis. This is a natural outcome of the continuous improvement that happens as your vendor’s team handles more projects of different kinds for diverse clients. That experience helps them anticipate problems in advance, troubleshoot better when needed, and also propose value added inputs based on their previous experiences. Chances are you can rely on your vendor (much more than you can on your internal team) to be ready with cutting-edge solutions. It is their business and they would (well, should) invest in innovation.

Reduce project risk
When outsourcing, you need to define your project very well to get RFPs ready. That reduces the risk to a large extent as everything you need is in one document – most probably has agreement of key stakeholders as well. The development process is better managed by the vendor including proper documentation (specification sheets, test plans, project plans, IDD, storyboards – with proper versioning etc.) and pre-defined delivery / sign off process (prototypes, Alpha & Beta deliveries) ensuring success of the project. You could even consider risk diversification by distributing work between multiple vendors i.e. if you have significant volumes of work to justify having multiple vendors.

More reliability on project completion
Often the company that you outsource to does only eLearning development as its core business. Consequently, all its processes and systems are specifically defined and well geared up to deliver eLearning products / projects. There is almost no chance of those resources being diverted to some other ‘more important’ tasks. That’s common when working with internal project teams. This reliability could mean a lot for certain critical training programs.

Focus on core / strategic goals
Though I list this at the end, this is the most important benefit you would get from outsourcing. Outsourcing helps bring greater focus to the core or strategic tasks of your training function – without sacrificing quality or service. You would better spend your energies on planning for future about how the organization and its business is changing, what skills are required now (& in future), and how best to make those skills available; evaluating success of training programs mapping them against business results, improving the whole training and development function to align it with business needs; and implementing organization cultural change plans to get it ready for the coming decade. These are tasks which only you can perform.

If you have outsourced for any other reasons we would love to hear from you. Please do share any other thoughts too.

Mark Berthelemy’s in his reflections on the event talked about the ‘disconnect’ between what was happening at the conference and at the exhibition area. Most vendors at the exhibition floor were selling ‘outdated products which won’t work’. His argument is primarily against the LMS systems which help us feel in control of providing & measuring access, completions, reporting, tracking, but not learning. Given that most LMS systems are digital versions of what classroom training management was all about, that’s not a surprise. However, the silver lining is that LMS systems are evolving to find a balance between an LMS and SNS. I am quite sure that some LMS systems will evolve and some wont; those that don’t will eventually die.

The Disconnect

In a follow-up post Mark argues – this disconnect is more about the beliefs and attitudes of those who hold the purse strings. I agree. Though I think that mindset is changing, even if it is slowly. Vendors (including us) are trying to educate their clients about newer solutions and how those could help achieve better learning results; which I agree with Mark is ‘change’.

The Other Disconnect

Mark’s original post generated a healthy discussion. Jay Shaw commented with a logical and passionate defense of the LMS which makes interesting reading & brings a realistic focus to the discussion.

In another comment, Robin Hoyle (who exhibited at the Learning Technologies 2010) mentions that vendors were not allowed to present at the conference – surprising but true!

What he says further is even more interesting:

“… no vendors would be a fine policy if no conference speaker ever pitched their book, blog or consultancy from the podium”

To be fair, everyone out there – speakers (at the conference) & vendors (at the exhibition stalls) are trying to promote themselves. Just that the vendors are doing it explicitly through a stall. There’s nothing wrong with either else, why would they be there in the first place? It is up to the buyers to decide and chose what ideas, products, or solutions may work for them. While one can say the vendors are selling old stuff. Vendors may say speakers are selling concepts that not many are ready for and may even ‘allege’ (for want of a better word) that in doing so speakers are creating an ‘unreal disconnect’, a big debate with no clear winners.

Is it a Disconnect?

I think a large part of the ‘disconnect’ isn’t real. Just because we are ready to accept and believe new ideas about what works doesn’t mean they’d be accepted and adopted immediately, that’s unrealistic. Each company is at a different level of maturity and that tie into their understanding of new & evolving learning processes, systems, and solutions.

Some may be already experimenting with social tools while others have no idea about such tools. Sometimes companies in a particular country /region are not culturally ready to accept solutions like social media so soon – even if their L&D managers and CEOs get it. And many a time clients just don’t have funds for the solutions that are ideal for their requirements. So they (along with their vendors) settle for something suboptimal – it’s not that the vendor started by selling suboptimal stuff.

Mobile learning (or mLearning) is probably a good example here. As an eLearning solution provider, we’ve been watching mLearning on the horizon for at least the last 5-6 years. However, it didn’t really take off till recently, when we are seeing real interest and adoption. Lower bandwidths, devices that aren’t capable, lack of proper development platforms & skills, or the mindset to leverage these – contributed to its slow uptake. We could say a disconnect existed back in 2004-05 when a speaker (talking about mLearning) at a conference couldn’t find a vendor in the exhibition area offering mobile learning solutions.

To me the real disconnect lies in the readiness of the overall market or region and specifically of individual organizations. Each is at a different stage. As solution providers we need to assess &understand that and propose solutions that work best for a client in a unique situation. We may choose to call this disconnect ‘disparity’.

As a closing thought, consider this: For every attendee at the conference, there are hundreds (probably thousands) of L&D professionals who aren’t attending. Some of them because of lack of time (or money) but then there are others simply because they didn’t want to. Maybe they think conferences are a waste of time and money as speakers talk of up-in-the-air stuff which either doesn’t make sense to them or does not work. A survey of people not attending the conference would be a good idea to unearth this. However, I do like Mark’s ideas about dealing with disconnect (or disparity).

What do you think?

Now that the results are out, here is a quick summary of the key points that emerge and we found interesting:

1. Salary ranges are very wide - For instance, some IDs with 2-4 years experience draw salaries of INR 800,000-10,00,000 while some other IDs with 6-8 years experience make just INR 350,000-500,000 only. That’s a huge mismatch and I’m wondering if the survey needs to capture many more respondent details to get a more accurate range. Or is such a wide range in remuneration a reality we live in. Another thought comes to mind – are all IDs same? In their education, experience and the kind of work they do. Guess not!
2. Variable pay - 75% of eLearning professional with salaries higher than INR 500,000 have a variable pay component. At Upside Learning we don’t have that as yet (except for sales people) but it sounds like something to consider for the future. But then again, do incentives really work for knowledge workers? I heard this Daniel Pink talk last week and I am kind of confused now. Need to give it more thought before we go down that route. I am all ears if someone from the eLearning industry can give advice on how (if any) a variable pay component for individuals has helped achieving their overall business goals.
3. The recession has had an impact - Severe impact I must say. 12.5% of the sample had a salary reduction, 34% remained at the same salary as of last year, and 33% had salary increments of less than 10%. I imagine those who had higher increments would be placed at lower rungs of the ladder (with lower base salaries) so the actual increase may not be great in real INR terms. The situation at Upside Learning has certainly been better than what this survey suggests. I‘m confident that eLearning is on the rise and that this situation will change in the next 6 months at most other companies too.

For a detailed presentation on results, visit Manish Mohan’s blog.
Manish thanks for making this survey possible.

In an even broader perspective, I think the workplace learning space is changing in a more fundamental way and this recession accelerating that change. Here’s a insight into what the industry sees as the ‘Future of Workplace Learning’ at the Learning Circuits blog.

Recently I came across this June 2009 dated survey analysis report from AchieveGlobal, called Learning in Difficult Times. As the name suggests, it tries to put a pulse to what’s happening in the corporate training and development domain. This survey was conducted in early 2009 and concludes – amongst other trends – that eLearning is on the rise. Here are my three key take-aways from this survey:

1.	Employee training and development is a long-term strategy The most compelling insight from the survey is that the notion of employee training and development being a long-term strategy and not a short-term fix is finally catching on. The report states: …51% of respondents report that their company’s level of investment and focus on employee learning and development has either increased or stayed the same in the face of current economic conditions. That despite 85% of those same respondents reporting that their organization has experienced a moderate to severe impact as a result of the recession. This is good news for learning professionals – training managers, HR heads, CLOs, training providers, eLearning vendors, etc. If this result is truly indicative of the real situation in most industries, training & development will soon get its rightful place in strategic decision forums (does that mean boardrooms?) across the corporate world.
2.	Leadership, Customer Service – getting most of the additional funds Leadership and Customer Service training are getting large amounts of additional funds. The graph below depicts the same.
3.	eLearning is on the rise In response to a question on the – predicted use of different training methods next year – external seminars seem to be losing out. That should be a cause of concern for Training Companies and Independent Trainers who provide external ILT training sessions. Classroom training (and by that I assume in-house training as opposed to external seminars) is finding favor as it would hopefully save some dollars on travel and other related expenses. Caution: This graph may not be the best representation of this information. It seems the positive axis should be “same or more use” even though the graph has it marked as “more use”. How did I conclude this? See this about classroom training from the report: It’s interesting to note that in contrast to the 39% reporting a decrease in classroom training, 61% of respondents report their use of this type of training will either increase (17%) or stay the same (44%). So it seems that the 61% includes responses given to both options “same use” and “more use”. Only 17% are saying it will increase. Further on Web-based learning the report says: Training delivery systems that are expected to experience a 50% or better increase in usage at our respondents’ companies in the coming year include Web-based e-learning, Web-based training such as LiveMeeting and Webex, conference calls and mentoring/coaching. …and… After weathering years of predictable hits and misses while working to establish Web-based learning as a viable training method, the scales are unquestionably tipping in favor of making this training delivery method a mainstay in progressive organizations nationwide. With 85% of our survey respondents anticipating that their company’s use of Web-based training will either stay the same or increase in the coming year and 87% predicting the same for Web-based e-learning, it’s safe to say that a trend is emerging.

So it is evident that for Web-based training, the graph should have read 85%/15% instead of 50%/50% that it shows currently.

Ok…so the conclusion that the graph is faulty is correct.
The key takeaway from the report however remains – eLearning seems set to grow next year.

Conclusion
These results reaffirm our confidence in eLearning as a business. I think the next 3-5 years would be a high-growth phase for eLearning industry. In my opinion, a large part of it would come from ‘traditional’ eLearning and not from the new age stuff that we keep reading about. This presents an opportunity for Training Companies to get online before the growth phase kicks-in. When the economy rebounds – some think it has already started taking a U-turn – training budgets would bounce back and eLearning would be in demand. You need to be ready.