Maintenance management e-training: What we learn from the users

The Maintenance Management profession requires a truly multidisciplinary set of skills. Higher education courses do not offer the necessary body of knowledge in a single course. Maintenance engineering training is offered by some postgraduate & vocational training courses. These often target specialized aspects of Maintenance skills. An important hurdle is that target groups are in most cases professionals who have already entered their working life. Due to their professional engagements, such user groups are under significant time and location constraints, often preventing them from attending a professional training course. E-Training is a viable, flexible and cost-efficient alternative for delivering Maintenance Management training. We report on the development of such an e-learning system, namely iLearn2Main. The main design considerations are briefly discussed, as well as its structure and key features, including a tool for automated competence assessment. A key focus in this work is to present results from pilot testing the system with different user groups. Some of the key findings of the user survey are outlined. It has been particularly encouraging to find evidence of practically uniform acceptance of e-learning technologies as a means of delivering maintenance management training. Among the survey findings are useful directions for further system enhancement and enrichment.