The unseen growth market: CBT on CD

The U.S. market for computer-based training CD-ROM products in North America will rapidly expand over the next several years. Most office environments have or are acquiring multimedia-capable PCs. The users of those systems are typically required to master various software application packages to be productive. How better to accomplish that than to provide those users with a collection of self-paced, comprehensive and convenient CBT discs?

But there's another element fueling the CBT fire: The market for commercially published discs is rapidly expanding to provide today's knowledge workers with the just-in-time training they need to maintain and fine-tune their skills. Part of the training is organization-specific, dealing with the policies and procedures of a particular workplace. That is where CD-R technology comes into play. Using the increasingly intuitive CBT authoring tools from companies such as

Asymetrix (Bellevue, WA, http://www.asymetrix.com) and Aimtech (Nashua, NH, http://www.aimtech.com), an organization can now develop its own internal multimedia CBT discs in quantities appropriate to work force size.

All organizations, regardless of their size, do some sort of training, and recent studies are finding that the training can be significantly enhanced through the use of interactive multimedia techniques. The problem, however, has been finding a cost-effective way to deliver that new type of training. The difficulties in delivering interactive CBT are solved by the multimedia capability in practically every PC delivered today--the CD-ROM drive. The production costs for providing multiple copies of a title are negligible and the content is certainly not changing every day.

The publisher must hope that U.S. customers are basically honest and that multiple copies of his product dispersed throughout a client organization will not necessarily lead to unauthorized use and lost revenue. Since the incremental costs of duplicate CD-ROM copies are not an issue, that approach might actually lead to a marketing advantage. Many organizations would probably appreciate the flexibility of having employees able to use their CBT discs whenever and wherever they pleased including on their home computers.