Celebrating 20 years of Highfield e-learning

The year was 1999, Tom Hanks was walking ‘The Green Mile’ and voicing a toy cowboy (for the second time), Eminem was telling everyone his name, Mariah Carey was a ‘Heartbreaker’ and Ricky Martin was ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’.

It was also the year that Highfield e-learning was born. We launched Food Safety 2000, our first foray into the world of e-learning, and chocolate giants Cadbury’s was our first e-learning customer.

There was scepticism about e-learning at the time. Training was very much a classroom-based affair. Laptops were still expensive and tablet computers were, well, very different to the tablets of today (the Apple Newton, anyone?).

In fact, the whole idea of an e-learning course was very different.

Our early e-learning courses were provided on a CD. Think about that. Most modern computers don’t even feature a CD drive!

It’s fair to say a lot has changed in 20 years.

Today, our e-learning courses are online training programs, accessed through a Learning Management System (LMS) and our online courses are optimised for tablets.

Perhaps the biggest change has been the way trainers, both private and corporate, think about e-learning.

Over the years we’ve had a few stand-out moments.

We’ve worked with some of the world’s biggest companies including PepsiCo, Nestle and M&S. We’ve created and deployed online courses nationally for the likes of The National Trust and the Security Industry Authority.

We’ve developed the Action Counters Terrorism (ACT) Awareness e-learning with M&S for NaCTSO which has been described as ‘45 minutes that could potentially save your life’, and has seen individuals from almost 4,000 businesses complete over 1 million modules.

Our online food safety courses have been used in over 65 countries around the world.

And, we’ve picked up a few awards along the way, with success in the Learning Technologies Awards in 2017 and 2018.

So, if you’ve been a part of our first 20 years, thank you. If you haven’t, well, we’re not going anywhere. We’ll still be going in another 20 years, so why not say ‘hello’ or browse our courses, we’d love a chat and the chance to learn how we can provide a solution for you or your business.