|Date: September 14,2010
To: Management team
CC: HR team and training team
From: Vivien Zou, Consulting director
Subject: Startup of a web-based corporate university
Recent study reveals that our company confronts low rate of return on training investment. While spending 10 million dollars last year on training, we only achieved 40% employee satisfaction compared to the national on-job training average satisfaction number of 45%. On one hand, not only does low satisfaction of training program contribute little to employees’ career-development, performance, and productivity, but it also causes low job satisfaction; on the other hand, low rate of return on training investment becomes an economic burden on the company. A survey shows that employees are not satisfied with trainings for three reasons. Firstly, our training system fails to meet job performance and career development needs. Secondly, general curriculum roadmap is not based on individual needs. Thirdly, employees sometimes cannot find time to attend training. To achieve higher employee satisfaction for our investment in training, we should start a web-based corporate university. This university can provide individualized training roadmap with more applicable online trainings.
Compared with our competitors, we offered more types of trainings, but the result is less satisfactory. About 60% of the employees complain that knowledge learned from trainings is insufficient. Thus, the 6 million dollars we spent on trainings is inefficient. In fact, the problem we face is not about the number of trainings but about the type of them. Within 30 trainings we conducted, only 10 of them are applicable to daily work. For an employee dealing with sales data, he is certainly more interested in trainings on Excel data analysis rather than on Statistics. The lack of connection between training and work makes employees unwilling to spend time on trainings. To closely link...