Why are we entering a New World of Learning?
There is much talk about how globalization and new tools are changing the world of learning. There isn't much clarity about how much the world has changed, and whether things that worked in the past would still continue to work. For example, "Training" used to be the main way learning was "delivered" in the past...will it continue to be the dominant way people learn in the future?
In this note, I would like to cover my thoughts on WHY things are changing. In a later posts I will visit the impact of these changes.
"What has changed?", I guess, is the first question to ask ourselves. Many things have changed- the office, the corporate culture, individual work habits, and the tools and technologies that are available everywhere cheaply.
Attention spans...shorter and shrtr. People are getting used to "twitter" speeds- talking in TXT message length statements. In this environment, it is harder to hold on to the traditional asumption that multi-tasking adults will be able to endure week-long trainings. All learning will have to be in short bursts, and preferably as close to the time of need as possible.
Globalization and the virtual workforce. Fortune 2000 companies have a third of their workforce outside the US now, and most companies are dealing with the "virtualization" of the workforce. People work from home, airports, Starbucks and pretty much anywhere but office. Companies now have to respond to a worldwide (anytime, anywhere, any device) demand for learning, and the traditional one-location-corporate-university is falling out of favor. Now corporate universities have to reach people where they work, both in terms of geography as well as location (laptop, not conference center).
Democratization of Expertise. Things have become so complex that, for most corporate learning needs, it is very difficult to find a single swiss-army-knife type of expert- one who is an authority on a wide variety of subjects. Instead, expertise now resides within "teams" instead of individuals. This, too, is a problem for traditional training models as locating "instructors" becomes statistically impossible. Instead, new-fangled web2.0 communities are the only way to access this pool of expertise.
Demography. Much has already been said about the ageing of the first world workforce, and the coming of age of the developing economy workforces. This demographic change will impact the learning style, the technological comfort, and the prevailing skill/experience levels of the workforce. This means, automatically, that programs designed for a certain type of workforce (say, the boomer generation) will not be as effective for the new workforce (say, the Millennial youth of modern India).
Pace of Change. Finally, the amount of learning one needs to acquire has gone up exponentially too while simultaneously the amount of time available to internalize this material has gone down. Within companies, you now need to learning about the impact of changing corporate strategy, sales strategy, product mix, business processes, application uses, compliance and safety, and a whole of of constantly shifting priorities. This means that there is high pressure to quicken the pace at which information percolates through the enterprise. Traditional- or even new wave - communication tools are not enough on their own. Most companies would need to use a wide selection of tools to ensure that people understand and internalize these new messages quickly.
To sum up, there are many reasons why corporate learning is going to change dramatically over the next few years. Most of these reasons are large-scale external variables that individual companies cannot avoid - they can only devise new techniques to cope with these changes. These changes are: shortening attention spans, globalization, virtualization of the workforce, democratization of expertise, global demographic changes, and the faster pace of change.
