Each employee needs to learn the basics of working in your company. They need to know about policies, procedures, sources of information, etc. For example, each new employee needs to learn how to fill out an expense account and select benefits options.

The new hires will initially be very interested in this training, but as their job pressures increase, they will be inclined to take only that training that’s immediately applicable to their day-to-day responsibilities.

The solution approach here could center on having the new hire take a lot of self-directed training, which could be tracked to ensure completion, and then putting the new hire in touch with a mentor.

You can use self-directed, on-demand e-learning that the new hire can take online through a Web browser. The student can learn company history, company policies, and also things like sexual harassment and health and safety issues. Part of this solution is also a virtual library of key policy and procedure documents, so the new hire can go back to a Web page and get reference docu¬ments at a later time.

You might want to include “self-check quizzes” so the new hires can tell what they’ve learned. You want to avoid too much emphasis on tracking and quizzing of the new hires. You don’t want to turn off your employees by making them take quizzes that they can’t always pass. Remember that the real goal is to get each new hire to feel comfortable so they can be more productive sooner.

You also want to avoid the complete lack of a human touch. You can build in the human feeling with mentors, occasional face-to-face sessions, collaborative online sessions with new hires, or other personalized communications with the employee.

Furthermore, you probably want a tracking system that shows whether the new hires actually completed the training, and you might want some short quizzes to determine whether they are actually learning or just turning the Web pages.

Another important part to new hire training is to assign a mentor to each new hire. This mentor should he an experienced employee who communicates with the new hire by e-mail or by phone—the mentor and the new hire do not need to be at the same physical location.

You also might want to consider the following:

• You can get courses on standard business issues (like sexual harassment, health and safety, etc.) from industry vendors. You do not need to create your own.
• Web page with frequently asked questions (FAQs) for new hires is a nice touch, as is a help line that’s answered by a knowledgeable human being. Sometimes a new hire will need to talk to someone in person.

Professional training can range for business, technical and management subject.  It can involved in negotiating, leadership, team building, business issues, or any skilled based type of knowledge.  You would want all your staffs to be able to attend such course.  However, due to time and cost constraint, learning via the elearning platform will be a great deal.

Infopreneurs who uses eLearning Community 2.0 platform comes from all walks of life. This include people from the following group:

a. Disadvantage Group
Generally physical challenge people have limited employment opportunity due to their mobility. This is one excellent target group to be infopreneur as they can chose to work from anywhere.  

b. Homemakers
Housewife who are interested to share their expertise and earn a living while remain at home. Retired people who chose to a sabbatical lifestyle at home can share their wealth of experience with others.

c. Unemployed People
People who are not in employment but interested to earn a living on their own effort will find becoming an infopreneur an excellent choice.

d. Self-Employed People
People in this category tend to have very specialized skills that are always in demand. However there is always a time constraint that limits their earning potentials. Take for example if you are a plumber, how many customers can you service in a day? Imagine if you could document your knowledge on how to fix a leaking sink into an information product, the world is your market. The list goes on and on.

e. Working Class People
A salaried employee often constrained by amount of money they have to spend. There is always room to earn extra income during their spare time. Becoming an infopreneur is a great way to realize their dream of an alternative lifestyle. You can always start small and grow big at your own pace.

f. Knowledge Workers
Knowledge workers like teachers, lecturers and trainers earn a living selling their knowledge. By converting their abundance of knowledge into digital knowledge, eLearning Community platform helps them reach out to more clients with lesser efforts.

g. General Public
Any avid user of internet with desire to share their experience and knowledge can be an infopreneur.

In the next article you will learn about information product and how to create your own products at ease.

The proliferation of internet has resulted in millions of people globally selling their expertise on the net as information products for almost 100% profits. You can be part of this lucrative business, as long you possessed some expert knowledge.  An expert is defined as someone who is “skilled through training or practice”.  As you can see, you can be an expert in your area of interest provided that you put in the effort to acquire it via training or practice.

An infopreneur is generally referred to as an entrepreneur who makes money selling information on the internet. They use existing data and target an audience. Actually infopreneur is not a new profession. Even before the existence of internet, legacy infopreneur sold their information in other mediums such as audio tapes, audio CDs, CD-ROMs, videos, talk shows, and conferences. The classification of infopreneur has created a new style of business on the Internet, which allows anybody with a computer and internet connection to start a business by publishing information that may appeal to a specific target market.

1. This is a company-defined competency (or certification). An outside group tell not be shutting your business down if some of your people fail the certification exam.
2. You can continue to have employees performing the job even before they are certified. And you can choose to have them con¬tinue to perform the job even. if they fail the exam. (Although you probably don’t want them doing it for long if they continue failing the exam).
3. You are not bound to meet a deadline set by an outside regula¬tory organization-for example, you don’t have a yearly recerti¬fication that you must meet. You can be more flexible about the time limits within which all the training and exams must be completed.

At stake is your ability to get high performance from your employ¬ees in certain jobs - where passing the competency exam is the mark of a certain skill level. You expect your business to run more productively when these key jobs are staffed to a predefined skill level.

The solution approach here, is centered on a learning management system (LMS). You need the LMS to manage the overall training program. You could never keep track of all the employees and how far they’ve progressed if you had to do it manually.

The first step is to develop a collection of training courses that lead your employees to the expected skill level. Depending on the type of competency being taught, the courses might be completely self-directed online, or you might include some courses with col¬laboration and instructors. In some cases (depending on the sub¬ject matter), you might even need to have a face-to-face session in addition to the online courses. We call this “blending” the instruction.

Then, you need the exams that the employees will have to pass.

The learning management system will present the “roadmap” of courses that each employee on a path to a competency exam needs to complete to prep for certification. The LMS will track which courses the employee has taken and which are still to be taken.

Some LMS can automatically schedule students for classes and can even automatically prompt the student with an e-mail  when he’s falling behind. And the learning management system will also deliver the quizzes and tests that move the employee along the compe¬tency’ roadmap, as well as delivering the final competency exam online,

The LMS will also provide reports to company management about where the various employees are in their competency road map, and it will report on who passed the final exams. The LMS an sometimes manage “testing out” of certain courses. If an employee has previous job experi¬ence, it would be useful to let the employee “test out” of taking the class.

The key advantage you have in this case study is motivated students. When the training is clearly connected to keeping a job, your training program has a good chance of overall success.