Global learning technologies provider Certpoint Systems and learning thought leader Charles Jennings have teamed up to identify five key trends impacting the way people learn.
The trends include being able to efficiently find and organise information to redesigning learning management systems.
Certpoint CEO Ara Ohanian said that change was now the norm in the digitally connected business environment and that collaboration was key to business growth.
"Growth depends on collaboration within the enterprise and across the extended enterprise with suppliers, distributors, customers and even competitors. We believe commercial success depends on the ability of employees and the technologies supporting them," he said.
The five trends are:
1. An organisation is no longer the unique keeper of knowledge
Digital technology and its inherent transparency mean that a commercial insight is as likely to be created by a supplier, dealer or customer as by the product development team. This fuels the need for social learning, collaboration and communities.
2. Business-focused learning not process-focused learning
In a volatile world, knowledge remains powerful but access to the right knowledge at the right time is where the real power lies. Traditional process-led learning must transform to give employees skills to achieve business results.
3. Finding needles in haystacks
IDC (International Data Corporation) estimates that searching for information consumes 8.8 hours of an employee’s time each week, while analyzing information to support decisions takes an additional 8.1 hours. The ability to efficiently create, find, organize and analyze information has become vital.
4. Mobile learning must move forward
Support for mobile learning has become a core business requirement. The ITU (International Telecommunications Union) reported nearly 6 billion mobile subscriptions at the end of 2011. Mobile learning needs to reach beyond content delivery to provide a conduit for collaborative working and learning.
5. New role for learning management systems (LMS)
Claire Schooley, an analyst at Forrester identifies a new role for LMS: it needs to integrate informal learning tools (including social); provide Amazon-type content evaluation and rating; allow flexibility to take courses offline and on mobile devices, and provide robust tagged content search so learners can instantly find a piece of content or document.
