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	Q1 2008

The Workforce e-Learning revolution

by Michael Brown, SkillsNET CEO

The e-Learning revolution is gaining momentum and will soon be impacting the way individuals acquire or reinforce important job skills and talents. Currently most organizations do not have a formal performance learning system but that will change. The fast changing “world of work” directly impacts job performance demands and workers that take a more self-directed approach to performance learning will be more “ready” to respond than those that simple wait for instructions to learn a new task, process or system.

What is e-Learning?
E-Learning, in short, is instruction that is delivered electronically. The term e-Learning groups together education, training and structured information delivered by computers, through the Internet or from the hard drive of the computer—or an organization’s network. Education, training and structured information overlap and are all part of e-Learning.

Human Systems Integratation Innovation

SkillsNET is proud to announce recent advancements of its Integrated Data Assurance Process (iDAP). iDAP is a unique data store that contains three levels of data for job and training requirments and system design support. What started at the United States Navy has now proliferated other services.

Introduction

Acquisition of complex systems and families of systems require the inclusion of the three major elements of those systems: hardware, software, and human operators and maintainers. These three elements have significant effect on cost, schedule, and system performance and must be considered throughout the systems engineering process, the systems acquisition, and the human readiness process. Historically, only hardware and software have been considered. This approach has lead to systems that are technically risky they are unusable by the human operators and maintainers, cost prohibitive over the life of the system, as total workforce requirements were not examined as part of the acquisition, and are poorly integrated since they do not allow complete realization of the operational capability potential of a fully-integrated system.

As the processes of systems engineering and acquisition have matured as disciplines, the need to fully include the three major elements of the system has become apparent. Scientists from SkillsNET Government, the Army, and the Navy have initiated an effort to investigate the inclusion of Navy personnel knowledge, skills, abilities, tools, and tasks (KSATT’s) in acquisition decisions as well as other planning and projecting. In addition, Congress initiated funding to support Navy exploration of the Army’s MANPRINT program, thus integrating human factors, personnel, manpower, training, and other human systems domains. The Navy established the SEAPRINT (Systems Engineering, Acquisition, and Personnel Integration) Team to explore the Army MANPRINT concepts and their applicability to Navy issues. The SEAPRINT team worked to establish taxonomies and glossaries to allow the successful integration of the human systems domains in Navy systems engineering and acquisition.