The training solution allows companies to offer their employees a variety of courses online, which can be completed at the employees' convenience, and provides access to a huge data-base of training materials from any location where there is a computer with high speed Internet service.

The offer to CWJ's corporate clients follows on the company's own use of the system through which it has trained 5,000 employees from a choice of 1,200 courses since 2001.

CWJ's regional vice-president and chief information officer Arthur Phidd said that having benefited tremendously from its own internal eLearning programme, the company thought it important to make the service available to other organisations so that they too could benefit.

"Globally, a lot of HR executives are now using e-learning because it's a viable option for increasing knowledge sharing and productivity while reducing training expenses.  Companies have been saving money because they no longer have to hold physical seminar and training sessions," he said at the launch at the Hilton Hotel in Kingston.

Henry-Wilson noted that the launch comes at a time when there was a need to ensure more Jamaicans got certified, as an estimated 80 per cent of the Jamaican work force has no formal certification.  She said there was a recognition that formal certification was not the only form of learning and as such, the HEART/NTA was now mandated to certify workers "as is, where is" to determine their levels of competencies.

"There is so much development taking place in all types of professions, skills and vocations that people will have to be constantly learning and re-learning.  Life-long learning is not just the latest slogan, it is a reality that we have to activate throughout our business, education and the wider society," the minister said.

She also noted that the Education Ministry in conjunction with the Ministry of Industry, Technology, and Commerce had also launched its eLearning project encompassing 150 high schools.  In addition, through a backbone created by the Joint Board of Teacher Education, the island's eight teachers' colleges had been linked, and a teacher consortium would be launched to enable their upgrading.  She said, too, that Jamaica was part of the Caribbean Learning and Knowledge Network through which persons would be able to access programmes from local and overseas universities online.

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