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Article: Corporate push for soft skills

The Australian, May 1, 2002
BYLINE: Patrick Lawnham

INTERNATIONAL corporate training specialist NETg http://www.netg.com hopes to expand its university content partnerships into Australia.

NETg, part of the information group Thomson Corporation, predicts more emphasis in the corporate market on "soft skills", or management training.

UK-based NETg managing director Roy Sunley said yesterday the group would hold talks during the next two or three months with four Australian universities, but would not say which ones. NETg was already buying content from universities elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region, he said.

Thomson is also a provider for courses from US-based online Cardean University, which sprang from the distance learning company UNext. NETg offers organisations other Cardean courses, with content originating from US and UK institutions such as Stanford University and the London School of Economics.

On the entry of universities into e-learning, Mr Sunley said: "Universities are like most companies. If they've got a good chief executive who wants to move into the 21st century, then they're getting behind it. But generally speaking it will take time."

NETg points to impressive predictions of e-learning growth from market research. US forecaster IDC, for instance, estimates corporate e-learning will be worth about $US72 million ($132.4 million) a year in Australia and New Zealand in a few years, and increase about 22 per cent a year thereafter. Information technology learning has been the main component up to now, but will account for only about half by 2007, it says. Most training is still developed in-house but this will decline, IDC says.

Mr Sunley, a former Royal Navy officer with a history in private IT for more than 20 years, said demand for training in soft skills was growing as companies flattened their management. Soft skills could be anything from project management to chairing a meeting.

Organisations were finding that a person who performed well in IT might need training to chair a meeting of sales and marketing people and "implementers of all sorts", Mr Sunley said.

NETg also teaches certification training, for courses such as Microsoft software engineering. NETg has about 1300 IT courses and about 300 courses in soft skills in European and Asian languages.

There remained situations, such as certification training, where live training was needed, but online training was "the base learning all the way through". Appraisal methods to determine which employees deserved a pay rise for skills learned were available. The company's IT training was in modules, some a matter of minutes, and included pre-tests to determine which modules the employee needed.

The Cardean MBA could be taken in modules, too. General Motors has signed a multi-million-dollar contract to take their middle to senior managers through at least part of the program. Some would do full MBA, others a portion, such as the finance module.