E-learning @ The Workplace

The increasingly global fast moving and rapidly changing knowledge economy demands responsive and insightful thinking, up-to-the-minute information and an ability to react instantly to strategic changes or developing market trends. The knowledge economy needs knowledge workers at all levels able to refresh or redirect their fields at short notice and in the most cost-effective and timely manner. To compete, organisations must be able to educate and train a flexible workforce on an adaptable 24/7 basis regardless of the practicalities of location. With the advent of the internet, electronically mediated corporate training and learning support efforts have exploded with growth and complexity. E-learning, a recent development which has already had a great deal of impact upon the corporate training world, is beginning to penetrate a growing range of areas within the contemporary workplace, and is widely being promoted as a panacea to present-day skill-supply and just-in-time-just-enough training needs. While electronic learning presents a number of potentialities as a viable teaching tool, organisations should be wary of claims that e-learning is a one-size-fits-all medium that can comprehensively address all their training requirements. Indeed, an important set of issues which has been relatively under-researched is that concerning the extent to which e-learning as a medium can deliver the kind of skills demanded by the “knowledge economy” characteristic of modern industrial societies. This special issue gives an idea of how some organisations are addressing the issue of e-learning @ the workplace. This issue is the outcome of a call for papers that asked authors to explore the capacity of e-learning for strengthening corporate performance and building competitive advantage in the present-day workplace and to consider the extent to which the utilisation of technology can enhance the learning process and provide practitioners with the leverage to manage knowledge for organisational gain. Papers that are conceptual or empirical, case-study-based, or based on sector-wide-analyses are provided. The papers underwent a careful selection and review process, and those presented here are “academic” in terms of rigour, but “approachable” in terms of readability and practical content. The sequence of articles begins with Juan Gabriel Cegarra-Navarro and Ramo´n Sabater Sa´nchez in their article “E-learning: organizational requirements for successful feedback learning” provides an insight from an empirical investigation of 151 small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) from the Spanish technology and information systems sector that examines the relative importance and significance of technology system on “learning” and their effects on the creation of intellectual capital. Anne Julien in her article “Classifying e-trainer standards”, shares with us the findings of her survey that was conducted