Everyday Financial Solutions (EFS) offers a wide range of credit, insurance and warranty products to customers of Littlewoods Shop Direct Home Shopping brands and has over 1500 employees across three locations in England. As a business with rapidly changing product lines, product features and a large number of call centre staff, there is a constant need for staff training, particularly in the areas of induction, FSA compliance and products and systems training.

 Before 2005, use of e-learning at EFS had been very limited but a number of factors led the training team to consider e-learning more closely in 2005. There was a business requirement to train more than 5500 heads across the three sites in the 2005/2006 financial year and classroom teaching was proving to be cumbersome, expensive and resource hungry. In addition, EFS had no systems training environments so training had to take place in live environments with an unacceptable risk to customer service. Overall, there was a need for much greater efficiency and flexibility in training, all of which could be addressed by the use of e-learning.

 EFS were looking for an e-learning authoring tool which could develop sophisticated and professional looking e-learning, be quickly mastered by the 21 strong staff in the learning and development team, could effectively simulate systems and could be used collaboratively across the three sites without difficulty. The Atlantic Link products: Content Point, Capture Point and Knowledge Point quickly demonstrated that they were the best option to fulfil these requirements. In addition, EFS were soon impressed by the level of support that the Atlantic Link team were able to provide.

 Implementation was a vital task as many of the training team were unfamiliar with e-learning and would need to buy into its capabilities and become comfortable with it as a tool for training. A steering group comprising EFS and Atlantic Link personnel was established and a highly successful strategy for introducing the tools was devised, incorporating initial training and ongoing skills gap work as development needs among the training team were identified.

 Successful e-learning is now in place across the business. Induction training is now e-learning based as is FSA compliance training. The flexibility of self authoring e-learning means that EFS are well placed for taking on third party work as these systems can be simulated in training using the Atlantic Link authoring tools. This gives EFS a considerable competitive advantage when bidding for such work.

 Jayne Harris, [position] says: "the adoption of e-learning and Atlantic Link’s rapid authoring tools has transformed our training capabilities. Our trainers have embraced e-learning as a positive training method. They are now able to use the authoring tools to develop, deliver and evaluate successful training. The success of the training is being shown throughout the business in improved staff retention and development."

The trainers have observed many specific benefits, captured by these comments:

• ‘E-learning helps to set the pace for learners with different abilities making training large groups easier’

• ‘It gives delegates who have missed some of the learning the opportunity to catch up without slowing the rest of the class down’

• ‘Preparation time is quicker as there are no environments to maintain or materials to print out’

• ‘Its allowed us to be more flexible in the case of another trainer needing to take over a course’

 The implementation of rapid e-learning involved EFS in an investment of around £60,000 in products and induction training but has since ensured significant cost benefits. In two years since 2005 it is estimated that the reduction in design and delivery durations has saved £127,000, in addition the need to create training environments has been removed and EFS training have saved in excess of £500,000 in IT effort.

 Jayne Harris sees the benefits as continuing: "The regular meetings and review of EFS materials with Atlantic Link are helping EFS to ensure that their approach is fresh, keeping the end users engaged so allowing them to learn from other organisations methods and keep their own learning up to date."