Mission E-possible: The cisco E-learning story

Cisco CEO John Chambers declared publicly that learning is a strategic prio rity for his company and important to the world economy. But there's a catc h: Chambers was endorsing only the fast-moving, results-oriented learning t hat is possible with e-learning. In declaring Cisco an e-learning leader, Chambers gave a mandate to his com pany: The e-learning operation would have to be exemplary, and serve thousa nds. To answer the challenge, e-learning stakeholders throughout Cisco came together to integrate the company's various e-learning initiatives. The council's first step was to catalogue all of the e-learning activities in the company and create processes and standards everyone could share. IT provided tools for integrating e-learning across Cisco by creating a learni ng portal with more than 8,000 resources organized around a set of learning roadmaps. In many cases, instead of building learning tools and systems fr om scratch, trainers bought them readymade and worked with IT to integrate them into Cisco networks and systems. The learning site contains an assessment engine that is built into the comp etency roadmaps, and some of the e-learning is assessed with the help of li ve mentors who observe learners' new skills in action. The site also provid es online access to Cisco's equipment labs. All of those options fur learne rs-constant access, choice in how they reach a learning objective, and plen ty of feedback-promote a state of continual learning for which the learner, not the instructor, takes responsibility. Two challenges Cisco faces: learning time not being a respected part of the job and the lack of widely used industry standards that would allow e-lear ning tools to work together.