Soft skills & E-learning: A new revenue streams!

Recently I have visited many e-learning websites, and found that most of them offer variety of soft skills training courses!

Usually soft skills courses used to be taught traditionally face-to-face not online, as they involve a lot of oral communications and body language arts and tools. The question is what made a lot of big corporations and companies to accept to train their employees by courses offered online? Do e-learning really help increase the efficiency of teaching soft skills? If yes, is there any proof that can we present and rely on?

The answer is yes, yes, and yes! According to an independent study made by Development Dimensions International addressing this issue and implementing a full survey on it, they found back in 2002 that e-learning is contributing to more than 42% of the learned soft skills in the sample they drawn! Imagine how it should be right now in 2008! At the very same study, they have shown a bunch of detailed pros and cons of e-learning, and how they suggest overcoming the problems companies faced in order to get the maximum benefit of it.

Please try to go through this PDF file if you are interesting and take a quick look on it…it is very useful to know generally.
www.ddiworld.com/pdf/ddi_stateofe-learning_rr.pdf

My interest overall is to realize the size of the market that we are talking about, and the huge amounts of money that companies are willing to spend in order to get their employees capable and handling enough skills to carry out their jobs and their lives either. No one can deny the advantages of teaching courses online being cost-effective and cutting big efforts for all parties. Nevertheless, the new commented trend is that companies more than individuals are more willing to engage online training. That is why we see many companies surviving and end-up with more profits from online training courses that relates to soft skills such as http://www.balancelearning.co.uk/. and there where the money is.

Amjad Alqaisi