Major training trends for learning include self-directed and on-the-job learning, with a greater emphasis on outsourcing, according to a seminar of leading e-learning exponents.

Some 150 of Europe’s top advocates of e-learning met earlier this month to discuss the industry’s key trends and issues.

Organised by global e-learning company TATA Interactive Systems (TIS), the meeting included details of IBM’s latest survey of CEOs. Piero Graneli, of IBM’s said the survey showed that CEOs believe that the biggest challenge to top line growth in their businesses is ‘people issues’ – especially ‘education’.

From IBM’s research, the emerging trends in learning include placing increasing emphasis on:
• Learner empowerment– learners are becoming responsible for their own learning rather than having learning ‘done to them’.
• Collaborative learning– recognising that some 80% of what humans learn is learnt by ‘being and doing’ on-the-job, through connecting with other people and the environment.
• ‘Embedded learning’– a revised and updated version of ‘electronic performance support systems’ (EPSS).
• Learning being about ‘reaching outside the organisation’ to customers and suppliers– passing on an organisation’s knowledge to these in order to build loyalty.

Also at the meeting Sanjaya Sharma, CEO of TIS, outlined five major trends Tata predicts for learning. These include:
• The delivery of learning materials to mobile devices is increasing rapidly.
• Outsourcing both HR activities and the production of training/learning materials is also increasing rapidly.
• Many training managers are being expected to rollout learning programmes globally – which indicates the growing globalisation of business.
• Those providing the input for learning programmes – the teachers – are, increasingly, being drawn from anywhere in the world, making their knowledge and expertise available to anyone, anywhere in the world, and thus making ‘learning’ a truly global activity.
• The growing realisation that ‘learning’ is merely a blanket term – like ‘fruit’ rather than ‘banana’, ‘mango’, ‘apple’ and so on. Consequently, those commissioning ‘learning programmes’ are becoming more discerning and, so, are now asking for ‘simulation-based’, ‘story-based’ or other, more specific forms of learning materials.