European organisations reap the benefits of outsourcing
Increasingly, organisations in Europe are taking advantage of commissioning their staff's learning materials from specialist companies, many of them with access to development staff based overseas.
One of the main beneficiaries of this trend is Tata Interactive Systems (TIS), the global e-learning pioneer which has one of the world's largest teams for the design and development of custom-built e-learning solutions. Since its inception in 1990, TIS has delivered over 950 e-learning programmes for more than 300 clients.
According to Daniele Zuccheri, TIS's European business development manager: "This trend to outsource e-learning materials is most noticeable within the field of information technology (IT).
"When an organisation implements new software systems, such as those from SAP or Oracle, which deal with organisation-specific data that can be commercially sensitive, it is impossible to use generic e-learning to train users of this software," he explained. "So organisations commission special, custom-built, organisation-specific e-learning programmes.
"Moreover, there are advantages - in terms of speed and quality of development - in outsourcing the development of these materials to specialist e-learning developers rather than attempt to 're-invent the wheel' by producing the e-learning materials in-house.
"TIS is currently working on 25 IT-related projects," he added.