Inexpensive and Effective Learning

Businesses are smart to be cautious in today’s economic climate and the ever present desire to do things better, faster and less expensively is stronger than ever before. One of the ways companies have been saving money is by tasking employees with additional responsibilities while simultaneously cutting budget dollars for training. If this seems counter-productive to you, you’re not alone.

As employees take on these additional tasks, it would make a lot of sense to provide them with even more effective training and the resource tools they need to get the job done. Informal and inexpensive learning solutions such as Wikis can serve both roles.

Wikis are finally being accepted as a viable resource tool for capturing employee knowledge, enabling collaboration and educating new and existing employees. By constructing well-structured informational pages on company procedures, best practices, new products, etc… employees can quickly find the information they need to help them perform their job, while also sharing their personal knowledge for other employees who are seeking answers.

Generally speaking, most people have a basic understanding of how Wikis are useful for obtaining and sharing information. Here’s a quick and entertaining video to explain how they are effectively used for collaboration…


While some naysayers still claim that the information found on Wikis contain too many errors, studies on the accuracy of Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica conclude that the gap in content errors is smaller than you might think. In one study from 2006, the results showed an average of four mistakes per Wikipedia article against an average of three mistakes per Britannica article. One could only assume that the content contained within a company-controlled Wiki would be even more accurate.

Informal learning solutions are the future of corporate training and the future is now.