Washington, D.C. -- The U.S. Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) e-Training Initiative received the Industry Advisory Council's (IAC) Excellence.Gov award for demonstrating best practices in Federal e-Government implementations. One offive winners, OPM was announced at the Excellence.Gov Awards ceremony and reception earlier this week, in Washington, DC.

OPM Acting Director Dan G. Blair said, "It is a true honor and mark of distinction for the e-Training Initiative to be recognized as a model of best practices in Federal e-Government. It speaks to the importance of e-Government and to OPM's dedication to encourage e-Learning investments as part of a strategic, systematic, and continuous development of human capital. These and other e-Government initiatives are critical in meeting the President George W Bush's charge to make the Federal government more citizen-centered, results-focused, and market-driven."

This year's winners of the Excellence.Gov Award are recognized for successful outreach and adoption of the Federal eGovernment implementation. OPM's governmentwide President's Management Agenda Initiative on eTraining was selected for the award by the IAC eGov Shared Interest Group (SIG) panel of 24 judges who are from government and industry.

Through proactive outreach to agencies, vendors, and government employees, the e-Training Initiative has registered more than 655,000 Federal enrollees in the governmentwide e-Training Initiative's Gov Online Learning Center, http://www.golearn.gov, and the numerous agency training systems provided by the GoLearn Service Provider. Additionally, the e-Training initiative implemented an e-Learning environment has been successfully adopted by more than 70 federal agencies - doubling the growth of participating agencies from 32 to 70 in one year.

E-Training is one of twenty-four e-Government initiatives outlined in the President's Management Agenda, for making the federal government more focused on citizens and results, and one of five e-Government initiatives managed by OPM.