Human capital is the most valuable asset of many organizations, and employees are increasingly being viewed as a competitive differentiators in light of the continued migration to a knowledge-based economy both in the U.S. and the rest of the world. This highlights the importance and cost of educating, training, and developing an increasingly dispersed competitive workforce that is critical to businesses achieving both their tactical and strategic goals.

Even as the importance of training and developing a competitive workforce increases, competition for qualified employees is intensifying, driven by baby boomer retirements and increasingly global service-based economies. An estimated 19% of the entire U.S. workforce holding executive, administrative, and managerial positions, is slated to retire in the next five years. Consequently, even in the face of a changing macroeconomic environment, companies are on the brink of a battle for scarce resources, which is driving investment by corporations in the HR and training departments. E-learning has proven to be of mission critical importance during any market cycle. As an example of the mission critical nature that e-learning can play even in turbulent markets, Prudential Realty uses an LMS to better train their representatives, and therefore, fend off attrition, have their agents better able to compete for new business, and increase morale by investing in educating their representatives.

Overall technology budgets in the HR department are expected to increase or remain the same in approximately 76% of organizations surveyed by IDC. These trends and forces are driving the need for organizations to more effectively manage their human capital resources to increase productivity and attract and retain talent.

The market has increasingly focused on a number of different but related processes, such as HCM, talent management, and workforce performance management (“WPM”). However, each and all of these processes, while important, will ultimately be rendered ineffectual without a learning and content management system in place to deliver, track, and analyze workforce training and development. Thus, learning and development systems should be the foundation for every aspect of a company’s systems and processes for managing the growth and success of its workforce. Moreover, as the competitive landscape accelerates new products to market, the need for a platform to aggregate, disseminate and consistently articulate the new product’s features, benefits, advantages and differentiators (training) has become mission critical.

Global IT University believes that it is hard to overestimate the importance of efficient and effective learning and development applications as the underpinning for workforce productivity solutions, which include content management, talent management, and collaboration systems. For instance, Extra Space Storage Inc. recently highlighted how important training and certifying their employees was to their employee retention and satisfaction and the company’s overall success. Additionally, companies are keenly interested in solutions that are flexible, easy to implement, cost effective, and have limited risk. Out of these requirements came the SaaS, or on-demand, model of delivering software to organizations.