Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy: An Empirical Analysis of E-Learning Adoption at Firm-Level

In a global knowledge-based economy, the performance of business organizations depends on ensuring that all categories of employees possess current and up-to-date knowledge and skills. Therefore, businesses must analyze their training needs in greater depth and update workers’ skills much more rapidly than in the past, while attempting to reduce training costs to remain competitive in this changing environment (Roy & Raymond, 2008). This requires organizations to educate and train anyone, anytime, and from anywhere with the lowest possible costs (Ong et al., 2004). Thus, many enterprises have turned to e-Learning as a best practice to provide adequate training to their employees. The aim of this paper is to examine e-learning adoption among a sample of European firms (an area for which empirical evidence is quite scarce), and investigate the factors driving its introduction.