Shell People Services today announces that it has entered into agreements with NETg and Cardean University to provide global e-learning services to the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of companies. NETg will provide professional IT and desktop computing courses while Cardean will offer business, management and leadership courses. These alliances will offer 81,000 Shell employees worldwide the ability to access the same standard of learning whenever and wherever they are via the internet. E-Learning has been used by a number of different businesses within Shell to date, but this is the first time it has been made available to the entire company globally. The solution will be rolled out across Shell over the next six months.

The initiative is led by Shell People Services (SPS), who provide HR services to the rest of the Shell Group and is available through their websites and the 'Shell Open University' internal training portal. Global e-Learning programmes are on the increase with many major names such as KPMG and Nestle recently announcing Intranet based solutions for their global workforces. Figures show that the global e-Learning market is growing at a rapid rate with predictions that it will grow from just $1.7 billion in 1999 to over $23 billion by 2004.

"Global training programmes of consistently high quality had been almost impossible to implement before e-Learning" said Paul Ratcliffe, e-learning consultant for Shell People Services. "Knowing that 81,000 people now have easy access to this method of development is fantastic and we expect usage to be high, with well over 100 course enrolments already received."