Towards Maturity, the benchmarking and best practice organisation which aims to improve the impact of learning technologies at work, has launched a new benchmarking service. Called the Head Start Programme, Towards Maturity claims that this 12 month blended support programme will use benchmarking to help users find the most effective implementation path to enable them to improve performance and overcome barriers. Users participate in an online community to share issues, seek feedback and get updates on support and resources that are available.

The key findings of Towards Maturity’s 2010/11 Benchmark Survey include:

• One in four organisations now allocate 30% or more of their training budget to technology-delivered learning
• 80% of organisations use e-content, learning management systems and online surveys
• 36% of organisations now use mobile technology to deliver learning materials
• 16% are using third party social media sites to deliver learning – and 76% plan to use these sites within the next two years
• Compared with delivering learning via the classroom, technology-delivered learning costs 18% less; reduces study time by 22% and doubles the volume of learning achieved by users

Comment: Towards Maturity not only believes that delivering learning via technology delivers more for less (a Lean approach) but that organisations that learn from each other reach their goals faster. So far, only 1,200 of the UK’s organisations agree with them but, now that Towards Maturity has signed up 16 organisations as ambassadors or supporters to promote these views, the numbers of converts should grow. The ambassadors/ supporters are Plateau Systems, Toolwire, REDTRAY, LINE Communications, Epic, Brightwave, Element K, Fusion Universal, Certpoint, The Charity Learning Consortium, LM Matters, TrainingZone, Training Journal, eLearning Age magazine, the eLN and the Institute of IT Training.