The course has been developed for financial services institutions, and enables users' progress to be tracked and recorded automatically, making mandatory training easier to deploy, more convenient and fully auditable.

Mobile learning has become popular with the financial services industry in particular because of the growing need for employees to complete mandatory training courses around new banking and trading regulations. Mobile learning enables employees to make use of naturally occurring periods of 'down time' - such as the daily commute or business trips - for training purposes. Mandatory training also has to be accessible to staff in the most convenient formats possible to ensure uptake across the board, and trackable mobile learning represents the latest advance in 'anytime, anywhere' training.

Financial services institutions are working with Intuition to launch training delivered via BlackBerry in response to growing business needs for remote access to learning via existing and new converged devices. Intuition demonstrated this new training technology at the recent Learning 2006 conference in Florida. Using the ever increasing popularity of the PDA as a way of delivering training is also an added benefit to companies that have already made the investment in the technology for communications purposes.

Intuition's mobile learning technology was developed to meet the needs of the typical mobile user, who actually only uses their PDA for a short period of time, but may access it between 30-40 times during the day. The mobile device user typically also has quite a short attention span, so the content needs to be targeted, specific and punchy in order to engage the user's interest. The targeted content can include information or specific courses on product spotlights or updates, regulatory requirements, organisational procedures and policies and case studies.

David Harrison, Chief Executive of Intuition, commented, "We are thrilled to have pioneered this new development in mobile learning, which transforms the PDA from being simply a communication device, into a vital tool for learning. We are seeing demand for these sorts of courses rise considerably, as companies are increasingly required to produce records of staff learning. Therefore, the ability to update individuals' progress directly to their learning management system is hugely beneficial. We believe this method of trackable mobile learning will become an integral part of organisations' training programmes in the very near future."