Learning is an ongoing event and part of everyone's job description as new responsibilities, companies, and industries become the hallmarks of economic development. In fact, training budgets accounted for six percent of payroll among leading firms in a recent study of 1997 data that was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Labor. The number is probably even higher today. Given the financial backdrop, it makes sense to regard training more as a process than as a periodic event like an auto tune-up. Traditional instructor-led training, however, won't disappear.
Content does matter and plays an important role in choosing what modality is best.
In addition, learning styles vary across people in such a way that the social, discipline, or entertainment elements of the classroom are crucial to the learning process. In parallel to the opportunity, there is a wide span of approaches to creating value propositions for users and investors. Some firms, Hungry Minds and Smart Planet among the leaders, have focused on building consumer portals, while others have become aggregators in the B2B market. Training Net is the largest of these firms, and offers more than 500,000 online courses across dozens of categories, including management and professional development skills, law, engineering, and Internet skills. Other companies, Centra among the first, have focused on building virtual classrooms and tools for collaborative e-commerce.