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I am certain that most of you here in this room with me would agree that technology is a wonderful thing. It is amazing to see just how far things have come over the past 30 to 40 years. For instance, in 1977, I landed my first job out of college working as a programmer, using a language that most of you probably never even heard of. Help me to satisfy my curiosity. How many of you have heard of COBOL? Common Business Orient Language Way back then, we had keypunch operators who would take my handwritten coding sheets, punch them into a terminal and that would generate a Punch Card. The computer itself that we worked on was in a room that was twice the size of this room. And the remarkable thing is that the memory of the computer that we had back then had a core memory of – ready for this?? 32 K. That is kilobytes. To put that into perspective, 32K is about a 2 to 3 page Word Document. That wasa then. But this is now. To show you just how far we have come, I could put about 1 million or more of those computers into this little hand-held computer that I keep right next to my heart. I am Warren Grantham and I am here to help you with the task of moving your current face-to-face training online. The overarching Program is “Six Steps to Moving Your Training Online. There will be several sessions, broken down mainly around the tasks involved in successfully launching your program online. Just as you had to be convinced that moving your training online is a good and maybe even necessary thing to do, you will no doubt run into those in the organization who will require a bit more convincing. After our first session, you will be able to not only defend the decision to move your training online, you will also be able to convince stakeholders at each and every level of management, using these benefits provided and discovered, every time they challenge you. Does that make sense? Great. Let’s get started. We are going to explore some of the benefits of moving your training online. Benefit Number One will be the favorite of all of your managers, especially those who pay close attention to productivity numbers. That benefit is Reduced Time Out of the Office. Now what manager wouldn’t want to kiss you if you could deliver effective training in less time? Number Two might be a close second to number one and that is Quicker Response Rate to their specific training needs. Number Three: Improved Training Quality. This is especially nice when you have a few people doing the same tasks and things must be done a certain way. Also, it is easily modified if the processes or tasks change and retraining becomes necessary. Number Four: Supported learning for remote employees. No longer do scheduling and travel time have to be an impediment to good training. Online training can be accessed from any place at any time, so long as the necessary equipment is available…and most of the platforms only require a computer and internet access. ---PAGE BREAK--- As the training group for your organization, you know the managers and their requirements. Each of you have been given little round stickers and a pad of sticky notes. What I would like for each of you to do is to take about 30 seconds to think about all of these benefits. My list is by no means exhaustive. With the people in your group, I would like for you to take just a couple of moments and come up with at least two additional benefits that you can share with the large group. Once you have written your two benefits on separate sticky notes, quickly post them on my chart up here. You will also find at your desk, little round stickers. What I would like for you to do quickly is to place your sticker on the benefit that you feel may be most persuasive to a manager that has the ability to fund this project. The idea here is that the benefits that have the highest votes we will spend the time necessary to make certain it is persuasive and supported by any of the others that we identified.