Brace for Boom in e-Learning Soon

The market for IT training will cross US$2.5b by 2004 in the
Asia-Pacific region alone

There's a new game in town: e-learning, or offering training over the Internet. Riding on the boom in the Net, the market for electronic learning and training is just about ready to take off with cyberspeed.

According to estimates from International Data Corp (IDC), the e-learning segment will boom at 93.7 per cent a year between now and 2004, when it will cross US$235 million (S$406 million) in the Asia-Pacific region alone.

That's the tip of the iceberg. Given that the Internet knows no borders, the three parties in the e-learning game - content suppliers, software enablers, and delivery providers - are gearing up to train millions of fresh students, mid-level executives and top-end managers, globally.

The global market for e-learning is expected to cross US$2 billion by 2004. E-learning forms roughly 10 per cent of the total market for IT training. Thus, in the Asia-Pacific region alone, the total market for IT training will cross US$2.5 billion by 2004, from about US$981 million last year, IDC says. These are still conservative estimates, since they measure only IT courses. However, almost any training that doesn't need actual physical manipulation (such as car driving, swimming or sports training) can be delivered using IT. Thus, the potential market for all training or orientation courses delivered via IT will be significantly higher.

There are basically three delivery mechanisms possible: via CBTs (computer based training), via LANs (local area networks), or via the Internet. CBTs can be offered in floppy disks or CD-ROMS; LAN training via corporate networks through a central server; and Internet-delivered training can come from any source and be delivered to any recipient anywhere on earth.

And e-training is what makes the vendors salivate. Take two examples, for instance:

• Huge populaces: In the Asia-Pacific alone, more than 21.7 million IT workers need to be hired if the projected IT growth in the region is to be achieved. You cannot pack such huge masses of people into classrooms with hundreds of thousands of instructors pumping knowledge in remote locations. The Internet is the only choice - it is cheap, fast, effective, efficient, and ubiquitous.
  
  
• Huge markets: Given the rapid pace of change in technology, even the existing pool of technical talent needs continual training just to keep up. Take datacommunications, for instance. IDC's newest report says the Asia-Pacific market for datacom equipment alone will cross US$9 billion by 2004, growing at 23 per cent a year between now and then. Just one sub-category - remote access market - will more than quadruple in the next five years in the region - to cross US$1.4 billion by 2004.

It is not just the market that's growing - the technology is too. Some of the routers and switches that were present three years ago are no longer manufactured now; even in the PC space, microprocessors, memory chips, storage devices and modems have gone through revolutionary changes. Only the keyboard, mouse and monitor have been relatively unchanged.

So, a fresh engineer graduating from most of Asia's educational institutions risks being obsolete before he gets his degree. In this scenario, continual training is the only answer. It is good that Singapore has given training and skills upgrading high priority so far. But, as the training demands become more compelling - and as competition ramps up to fill the rising demand - it might be worthwhile taking a fresh look at this sector to see what more we could do to win a bigger chunk of the global entraining pie.

By Raju Chellam The writer is BizIT Editor

The article is from Business Times.

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