Acquiring new information and knowledge as well as spreading it inside of the company is seen as a source of competitive advantage these days. To change a company into a "learning organisation" means to change the way the company's employees work and learn. For ena-bling their employees to be creative and work in an efficient way, on-going vocational train-ing is being used to keep them up-to-date and to improve their job performance.

Talking about "learning organisations", you will come across the term professional learning (PL). In the following, we will use the idea of PL as it captures a broader view and the im-portance of vocational training in companies.

For Marchionini & Maurer [5] "...professional learning refers to the on-going learning that adults are engaged in to do their work and improve their work-related knowledge and skills." It is also "...unlike formal or informal learning, focused on a specific field closely linked to job performance, aims to be comprehensive, and is acquired and applied longitudinally".

By this definition it becomes clear that professional learning is closely related to the employee's background preparation and current work definition settings. But as companies want to improve their status in economy, it is their goal to keep their employees on top of their jobs, especially where knowledge is advancing at great speed, e.g. in the area of research & development. From the employees' point of view, career development is a key element in their work life. As a result, companies should encourage their employees to change their job, e.g. through "job enrichment" or "job enlargement".

Traditionally, vocational training is organised in the two following ways:

Training-on-the-job Vocational training directly at the work-place, linked to the actual tasks under the control of an internal supervisor/colleague Learning-by-doing concept; learning from ones own experiences and those from di-rect colleagues (è see principle of the "personal web") Good communication possibilities with direct help and feedback from colleagues Content and time of learning is deter-mined by employee but limited due to work Learning from experiences and working go together for short periods

Training-off-the-job Vocational training outside of the com-pany/department for gaining expert / gen-eral knowledge Independent from the workplace Organised in trainings, seminars, work-shops or by attending conferences (Personnel) Managers send their staff on a regular basis to training sessions The content and the time of the learning process is not determined by the employee himself Times between learning and working are seen as two separate periods of time

Table 1: Organised vocational training.

In this part we will have a brief look at the different target groups of professional learners in corporations and students of higher education studying at colleges or universities.

Again we look at professional learners at companies and compare them to student of higher education programs.

One of the most challenging aspects is that students at universities are a quite homogeneous target group concerning their background, school-based knowledge and a basic level of in-formation technology (IT) usage. For the personnel department of a larger corporation it is their main task to provide job-related and maybe personal skills training to very heterogene-ous target groups, especially when the company can be divided into a technical production part, office staff and the management. So they will have to deal with differing training areas within the company.

When talking about the acceptance of introducing or using telelearning tools, one has to have the differences of target groups in mind.

As a start, companies should consider the general level of competence of using IT equipment in their target groups. Normally, office staff members will already be used to sit in front of a PC and maybe also communicating with each other in a non face-to-face contact. But as firms usually have employees of different ages, those people may have different views on using communication technology and therefore having problems of accepting new media for their vocational training. Telelearning won't be effective then. At the university, classes will consist of students of equal age; those younger people are more open and used to new technology and will accept telelearning methods more easily.

In companies again, not only IT based knowledge will differ but also the work/experience-based knowledge. Therefore the human resource department will have to offer a telelearning system that offers a great range of small learning sections of different levels and that enables employees to get in touch with colleagues via communication tools to ask questions when the information that is offered by the system (database, CD-ROM) is not sufficient to solve the task.

When looking at the possibilities and acceptance of telelearning systems, the various degrees of perception between younger and older people have to be considered. Again at the univer-sity, younger people have a more similar level of perception and will therefore easier read and store information from telelearning courses.

When you have different types of learners as in a firm, different ways and speeds of learning due to various ages will be important. If the media that is offered by a telelearning software (from intranet, CD-ROM or WWW) will be too fast, too much or not the right content, the employees will become frustrated and not accept offered telelearning courses in the future.