Pilkington has awarded online learning provider SkillSoft a 3-year contract worth nearly £380,000 to supply training to its workforce. Pilkington has purchased SkillSoft's entire management, business & IT curriculum, together with selected health & safety courses. To address the global nature of Pilkington's workforce, the content will be available in Spanish, Castilian, Polish, Russian, French, German, Italian & Mandarin. It will be accessible to all 24,000 employees via the internet. Roy Prescott, group learning & development manager for Pilkington, said: "Having experienced some service & deployment issues with a previous e-learning provider, we stipulated that SkillSoft must run a pilot for a six-month period prior to committing ourselves to signing a contract. "The result was that we had more than 500 new registered users & in excess of 700 completed programmes" within that period." The company is now in the process of rolling out technical courses to its global IT personnel, and will also be offering a number of health and safety courses to all employees.
