eLearning increases capacity to meet training needs

“Making decisions on the basis of low cost/high impact means that eLearning is the best available approach to meet our needs.” Kris Medlang, Shelter 

Any organisation that doesn’t have access to eLearning is basically limiting the scope of its engagement with its staff and volunteers. Traditional training might meet a number of core learning needs, but these will only be a fraction of what volunteers, employees, managers and leaders require to be effective and successful. 

Lack of time and budget will inevitably mean that many learning requests have to be declined, deferred, or even outsourced – at a high cost per learner – delivering poor value for money. And these only address the needs that you know about. In reality, many learning needs go undiagnosed, which holds people and organisations back. 

Having access to a broad suite of eLearning means charitable organisations can provide an extensive learning offer to all their staff and volunteers. If this is done well, then it will also inspire people to seek out new learning opportunities that they might have overlooked. 

Case study: Kris Medlang, Learning and Organisational Development Business Partner, Shelter

Working in a charity, we want to deliver all the learning the organisation needs, whilst being mindful of using our funders’ money in an accountable way. Making decisions on the basis of low cost/high impact means that eLearning is the best available approach to meet our needs. 

With everyone being able to access learning from wherever they are, we have a great platform for sharing knowledge held by our wealth of subject matter experts. This simply couldn’t be tapped into through more traditional methods. We can now easily distribute learning – in various digital formats – provided by our experts, in topics such as the law, support networks and domestic violence. The results from working like this mean it has been well worth committing time to build partnerships between our internal knowledge experts and the learning team. 

Having eLearning means we can also deliver niche solutions that simply wouldn’t have been viable beforehand, such as providing resources in the areas of housing law, benefits and debt and environmental health. With Covid-19, our experts were quickly able to consider emergency legislation, and curate new eLearning content that was in the hands of learners within days. 

Find out more about organisational development at Shelter in this interview with Kris Medlang for LNTV and this downloadable case study about transforming the charity’s learning culture.