All Aboard E-Learning At Air, Rail CompaniesAll Aboard E-Learning At Air, Rail Companies

Airlines and railroads have something in common beyond the fact that they're all about moving people and things from one place to another. Some of the biggest players in these heavily regulated industries are finding that E-learning and learning-management systems provide a cost-effective way to keep employees up-to-date on new regulations or industry certifications and to maintain records of when they've completed training.

American Airlines last week began offering annual flight-safety certification classes to 24,000 flight attendants using IBM's Lotus LearningSpace product. The airline also will use the software's learning-management capabilities to monitor course completion in a centralized database. American says the deployment will help it save on training costs and gain efficiencies. For example, attendants now can log on to a Web site during a layover anywhere in the world for four short-segment classes to attain the federally mandated certification.

Starting Jan. 1, Union Pacific Railroad is going to begin certifying that 18,000 train-service employees across 23 states are compliant with federal regulations via a new E-learning system. This month, it replaced a learning-management system from Pathlore Inc. with one from Plateau Systems Ltd. and will integrate that with its PeopleSoft 7.5 human-resources system, eliminating the need to manually update HR records once a course is completed.

That opens another door, says Kevin Naylor, Union Pacific's assistant VP of HR planning and development, for the railroad to integrate its payroll and learning systems to automatically compensate employees for passing certain skills tests.