Training is an essential component for any organization. It can help align new employees with the company’s vision. Training also serves as a skill development venue that enables career growth for individual employees. It can increase productivity, help deploy new systems and promote safety. However a company chooses to use its training and development initiatives, it eventually leads to better corporate performance.

In reality though, not all companies provide continuous learning opportunities. The hindrance often concerns lack of time to do it and lack of space to foster a proper training environment.

However, recent technical innovations have changed the way things works. In the last five years the development of rich interactive applications like AJAX and Flash have made the deployment of training materials easier. Enter Web 2.0, and it’s just a whole different ball game. Wikipages, photo sharing, podcasting and blogging did just make things easy for the trainer, it made knowledge sharing fun.

The Web 2.0 world makes it possible to share training materials to a company’s staff without the hassle of software licensing, maintenance, tons of paper work and actual classroom set-ups. Here are some benefits of Training ala Web 2.0.

1. Save the trees – Taking your training manuals and materials to the web has one clear cut advantage over traditional training methods, less paper printouts. The Web 2.0 technology is browser-based and can easily be implemented even by those who are not so Internet savvy.

2. Better scalability – Whether you’re training a single person or a group of 1,000, a web-based training application can do the job. Even better, you can continue adding material to your training section, often times without additional charge.

3. Cut on implementation costs – The very essence of the SaaS (Software as a Service) delivery method is to quickly enable applications. This takes out the need for software installation and additional purchase of hardware machines.

4. Increase training productivity – User-centric designs allows better interaction with the interface. Features like tags help with faster topic search and easy access to the specific item the trainee needs.

5. Promote interaction and feedback – On-demand training applications that use wiki-style editing allows other departments to add to your knowledge base. Even better, the commenting feature encourages feedback from both users and other training site administrators.