Clive Shepherd maintains that difficult times provide a great opportunity to implement change and make decisions that have been on hold for far too long. Here he argues that the next few years could be make or break for many working in learning and development – but maybe that's not such a bad thing?

Recessionary times are not usually good ones for learning and development. When money's short, management looks around for cuts it can make in expenditure that won't threaten the business. First to go is usually all but the most necessary travel expenditure. Next in line is training.

At this point it's typical for learning and development people to protest the short-sightedness of management decision making. Surely, they say, it's at times like these that you need to be most competitive, to hone skills and maximise performance. Training is an investment in people, our greatest asset.

"All we need is the will to engage with the new technology, to become the agents of change and not its victims."

In difficult times, these protests will fall on deaf ears. Managers know that training is a 'nice-to-have'; important perhaps in the long run, but certainly not urgent. All departments can argue that their work represents an investment: management has to decide which of these represents the best bet. In the end, they'll go for the ones that stand the best chance of generating the greatest return in the shortest time.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. There are two ways of approaching a crisis: you either carry on as usual, in a state of denial, and hope the worst won't happen or you take the proactive route, accepting there will be some pain, but making sure there's a positive return on the experience, if only in the long run.

Difficult times provide a wonderful opportunity to implement changes, to make decisions that have perhaps been on hold for rather too long. And, the forces for change have never been stronger, particularly when it comes to your choices of training methods and learning media. Let's take these in turn.

Training methods are relatively timeless, but there are at least three major developments that are likely to influence the choices we make from the options available. The first is the enormous progress that has been made in recent years in both cognitive neuroscience and learning psychology, which have helped us in understanding how learning takes place and how it can most readily be facilitated.

The new science requires a rethink of long-held learning theory and puts to bed much of the pseudo-science and pop psychology that has plagued L&D for decades. Alongside this are compelling new ways to look at learning overall. The best example of this is connectivism, as espoused by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, which reflects the realities of an age in which it is less a matter of what you know, but how sophisticated your network of trusted sources is, in terms of both people and content.

Another influence comes in the form of new expectations from a new generation of learners. Members of the so-called Generation Y, born in the 1980s and 1990s, are highly technically-literate and assertive. They are not used to being passive participants and will be quickly turned off by traditional top-down approaches to communication and training. For Generation Y, everyone is a teacher as well as a learner and peer opinions count much higher than those of the experts.

The third influence is the increasing pressure we are facing in L&D to respond more quickly to training needs. According to Bersin and Associates (2005), '72% of all training challenges are time-critical'. We have less time to analyse, design, develop and deliver. It's no longer acceptable to plan all training interventions in months - we're now talking in weeks, days, even hours.

We are also experiencing pressure for change in our choice of learning media. After thousands of years of being restricted to face-to-face communication, supplemented over the past 600 years by the printing press, we are now inundated with media choices. Our choice of medium does not make learning more effective (it's the methods that achieve this), but it certainly makes it more efficient.

We now have computers and mobile devices that provide massive power and versatility at rock-bottom prices. Software tools make it easier than ever before for learners to communicate online with other learners and with tutors, and to access every conceivable type of learning content. Many of these tools are open source or free.

Bandwidth, both wired and mobile, ensures our online experience is as seamless and as media-rich as we could want. All we need is the will to engage with the new technology, to become the agents of change and not its victims.

The next few years could be make or break for many working in learning and development. Either we respond proactively and bring about the changes that will make us relevant to the realities of a world in recession, or we sit back and wait for the inevitable. As Jack Welch famously said, "When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight".

Clive Shepherd is an independent elearning consultant and current chair of the elearning network. Visit his blog at: clive-shepherd.blogspot.com
For more information on the elearning network, visit: www.elearningnetwork.org/

We hope to see more from Clive Shepherd on TrainingZone.co.uk with contributions to our Watercooler blog