Since its inception, IBM had been focusing on human resources development.

The company
concentrated on the education and training of its employees as an integral part of their development.
During the mid 1990s, IBM reportedly spent about $1 billion for training its employees.

However, in the late 1990s, IBM undertook a cost cutting drive, and started looking for ways to train its
employees effectively at lower costs.

After considerable research, in 1999, IBM decided to use e-learning (Refer Exhibit II) to
train its employees. Initially, e-learning was used to train IBM's newly recruited managers.

IBM saved millions of dollars by training employees through e-learning. E-learning also
created a better learning environment for the company's employees, compared to the
traditional training methods. The company reportedly saved about $166 million within one
year of implementing the e-learning program for training its employees all over the world.
The figure rose to $350 million in 2001.

During IBM's WorldJam 2004, a 72-hour online dialogue that senior leaders opened up to
the company's 355,766 employees worldwide, executives learned that workers wanted
greater access to more and varied experiential learning.
As a result, the IBM Learning and Career Development Department created Blue
Opportunities, a program now offering 95,000 learners about 1,400 training
opportunities--such as stretch assignments, cross-unit projects, short- and long-term job
rotation, and on-site job shadowing--via an employee-only Internet site that erases country
borders.

they have plenty of examples of experiential learning scenarios designed by IBM managers,
instructive anecdotes from individual workers and a host of documented benefits.

Among those benefits: the relationship that IBM managers and workers build by
having dialogues about individual development plans. Once employees have those
plans in place, they can search for opportunities from the Blue Opportunities site
to help them achieve their goals, says Thompson. Similarly, program
administrators have created tools to help employees understand experiential
learning and career development.

Benefits All Around

Thompson lists many benefits for managers who post opportunities in the database, such
as:

* Providing an additional way to share expertise and synergy across departments and
multiple lines of business.

* Helping employees develop competencies and careers.

* Creating access to cross-business functions, thereby allowing employees to contribute

knowledge back to their teams.

* Exposing a specific workgroup's expertise to a broader group of workers.

* Grooming future talent.

IBM has thousands of Managers around the world who are required to go through periodic ´face-to-face´
training. IBM were faced with a major problem - travel to attend training sessions was costing a fortune, and
eating into busy managers working time. IBM introduced one hour TeleClasses allowing trainees (and
trainers) to come together by telephone from anywhere in the world. The benefits and cost savings come in
many areas - travel costs, loss of working time, no need for refreshments, of producing expensive course manuals,
24-7 Coaching IBM cut costs with TeleClasses (as these are delivered electronically by email), and stress levels
reduce.

Recordings are made of each session and are accessible 24/7. So if a trainee misses a class they can tune in at a
more convenient time. IBM is currently extending their TeleClass system across the organization. Susan Valdiserri
said that "the TeleClass system is so easy to use that we are converting much of our existing training materials into a
programme we call ´Just-In-Time-Learning´, using a combination of the web TeleClasses