Thank you. I guess I could have done this through video conference and it would have been more true to form, but that's all right. I just have a few short comments to make, an opening statement of six minutes and 32 seconds, by my watch last night. Hopefully that will prepare some context for the questions that will follow.
The Canadian Police Knowledge Network is a federally incorporated not-for-profit entity that partners with the police community to develop and deliver technology-enhanced learning. We are the leading provider of e-learning in the Canadian police and law enforcement sectors.
I am here today to share my thoughts and experience regarding police training in the context of the economics of policing discussion. I have participated in two of the regional sessions, as well as the summit that occurred here in January.
Though there has been much dialogue about the sustainability of the current policing model, I found it interesting that there has been little or no discussion about training as it relates to potential efficiencies. In this country we consume about $1 billion a year in police training. That's 8% of the overall $12 billion on policing, yet nobody is looking at this strategically as a way to do things better. That's what I'm going to talk about today.
My objective is to share what I know about the benefits of technology as it relates to training both economically and otherwise, and its potential to be part of the overall solution—and I stress that it's part of the overall solution. It's not the be-all and end-all. The work we've done has shown many advantages of taking a more strategic, collaborative, and sector-wide approach. Above all, we know that we can enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of training with improved use of technology.
Don't get me wrong, I think that police training in this country is mostly done very well. I'm not here to bash trainers to any extent. But I also think the model must continually evolve and must improve to gain efficiencies to meet new learner expectations as well as to keep pace with the changing needs of front-line police officers.
I don't believe that technology is the be-all and end-all. You can't learn how to swim online. There are some things they have to show up and do face to face, and we're not going to eliminate that. What we're going to do is make the best use of the time spent in classrooms and make sure that knowledge transfer happens as efficiently and effectively as possible.
A little background on CPKN. We've been around since 2004. As I said, we're not-for-profit. Currently we have about 100 courses in our catalogue, many of those in French as well as English. We have about 75,000 registered users. If you think of the Canadian police community, there are about 70,000 front-line officers. We do police and law enforcement, so we have a pretty good penetration in terms of across the board. And collectively those users have completed about 400,000 courses online. So we've been around for a while, and we kind of know this business as well as anybody in this country.
Interestingly, we have an 85% approval rating from end users from the use of the courses. Again, we are building effective courses that people like. Our mandate is to increase accessibility, scope, and cost-effectiveness of training. We also play a significant role in introducing innovation to this sector.
Interestingly, our model does not rely on any annual government funding. Revenues are generated based on a very low cost pricing model where individual police services can calculate the value in the ROI themselves. So we're not-for-profit, we're run in a very businesslike fashion. I like to tell people we're not for deficit. Last fiscal year I think we broke even, or we were ahead by $10,000, and that's where we like to be, just barely breaking even.
The reasons for our sustainability and success are really three-fold. E-learning has some very well-known value propositions. The first and foremost—and I won't get into all of them—is that you can take four hours of classroom training and distill it down to about one hour online. So if you think of the efficiencies of that, there's ample opportunity for value when you put that across all police training. Build it once, use it many times. You collaborate on that. We have courses that we've been using now for five or six years. We update them and keep them modern, but it's the same content. So you don't have to keep bringing in new subject matter experts, or continually using different people across the country. It's about anywhere, anytime access.
Secondly, our model is very collaborative. I am the head of an organization of about 20 people, none of whom is a police officer, none of whom are former police officers or subject matter experts. We rely on the police community to identify priority training topics, to come to us with the content and the subject matter experts. What we can do is turn that into an effective online training experience. It's about cops teaching cops cop stuff, but in a very different delivery mode.
The third thing we have going for us right now is the whole network of relationships that we've built up over time. We're connected with every police service in the country: all the major police training academies, the Canadian Association of Police Boards, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, and on it goes.
Our board of directors is the main selling point for our network. You've had some of these people already here in front of you. Commissioner Chris Lewis of the OPP is on our board, as are Chief Andy McGrogan, from Medicine Hat, and Geoff Gruson from the Police Sector Council. In the past, people like Julian Fantino have been on the board. He was chair for a few years until he got busy doing something else. I'm not sure where he is these days.
The model we've created is a best practice, really. In a sector well known for its stove-pipe tendencies and for its jurisdictional rigidity, we've been able to break down some of those silos and build courses that work across the country.
As it relates to the economics of policing, while all of the things I have just talked about are great, but we believe that we're just scratching the surface. We can go much further. I talked about the $1 billion. There's ample opportunity for efficiencies there and that's what we have to concentrate on. On the $1 billion, if you were to ask most police services what their training budget was, they would look and see the line item “training budget”, and that would cover trainers' salaries, classrooms, supplies, tuitions, and those sorts of things. But it doesn't count, in a lot of cases, are things like travel and accommodation to go get training, backfilling, and overtime for people who are off on training. But most importantly, what it doesn't count is the amount of time of those bums in chairs. The people in the classroom are getting paid, so we have to calculate that. When you bring all that into account, it's $1 billion a year. There's stuff we can do around that.
We have tons of studies—as I said, we've been around since 2004—demonstrating the ROI of moving from traditional classroom to an online or blended approach. We can talk about those. Also, research shows that online training, if done correctly—which I say because there's a lot of schlock out there—can be equal to or better than classroom training. That's the goal of this, to build really effective stuff.
So why are we only scratching the surface, given all the hard evidence to the contrary? There are lots of barriers to change, as we know. Everybody loves the status quo; nobody likes to change. There are cultural, financial, and technical issues.
The cultural bias is the hardest to overcome. Most of the people in this room, some of the younger people maybe not, grew up in classrooms. We are used to having that kind of training, consuming training in that way. There are a lot of institutions that are built up to train that way. Despite that hard evidence, we have to break the status quo. This is disruptive innovation. It's about shaking things up.
I want to stress that training in this country, by and large, is done well. I'm not saying to throw that model out, but I think we can do it better and that we can do it better in lots of ways.
The last thing I want to talk about is that regardless of what I think or what anybody wants to do, change is going to happen. We know that. We know there are forces at work here that are larger than any of the status quo forces. Demographics, technology, and economics are all things that are converging right now.
On demographics, we know that younger people and most front line police officers are in that demographic. An average hire these days is around 26 or 27 years old. About 50% of front line police officers have less than five years experience. You put those two things together and you know that most front line police officers are young.
They embrace it, and are fully adapted to consuming information and training through technology-based mediums. It's not simply a preference. Research is showing they actually process information differently than other generations do. I'll leave it to you to define other generations. But I'm in that group and we must respond to that change.
They don't sit in the classroom very well for two weeks. They just don't. They don't learn stuff. They have their hands in their pockets. They're texting people. They're doing things. You tell them what they have to learn, tell them by when they have to have it learned, and they'll come back ready to do the face-to-face, hands-on stuff.
With technology, we know that change is ubiquitous; it's not standing still. Gaming, simulations, community practice, massive open online courses, mobile learning, just-in-time learning, and operational support tools.... RoboCop kind of stuff is not very far in the future. This is where we're going. We can't stand still; we have to pursue this.
As it relates to the economics, what's interesting is that training is the first thing that's cut. When you budget cut, training is easy; it's just sitting there. As we know, it's deferred maintenance. You're going to pay the price for that at some point. If we do this right we can benefit the police community. Build it once, use it many times; it's cost effectiveness that way. We can reduce the amount of effort going into training by minimizing resources required to produce training, thereby minimizing duplication. And we can convert a significant portion of the time officers currently spend in training to time on the job, where we want them. This improves productivity without impacting quality.
To sum up, to do it right we have to have research, best practices, and sector-wide collaboration. I think the $1 billion is a good target and should motivate us.
Thank you.
