However, I believe it is the next 10 years that will bring the greatest changes for L&D. These changes are being driven by a shift in how we use technology to learn and an emergent demographic fluent in today's emerging technologies. As L&D professionals, we must prepare for changing user needs now or we risk failure in supporting long-term business growth. 

So how are the next 10 years likely to shape up? And how are these technology-driven changes going to impact L&D's role?

 

Firstly, let's look at today's changing demographics. We currently have four generations working side by side and in just four years time, almost 50% of the workforce will be made up of Millennials (people born between the late 70s and 2000). These individuals have grown up with technologies like facebook, Twitter and online gaming and are used to sharing bite-sized nuggets of information amongst their peers through such technologies.  

The structure and boundaries of the workplace are changing too. It is becoming increasingly common today for teams to be comprised of employees from multiple countries across several time zones, making classroom-based training, for example, increasingly impractical and expensive for some international organisations.

With both demographics and today's technology landscape rapidly changing, one of the biggest challenges for L&D is going to be to work out what technologies are appropriate to deploy within their corporate environments. So, which technologies should we consider? It is clear from the rising popularity of social networking sites, that informal learning tools that leverage a social and collaborative learning aspect will fit very comfortably with the younger generations that will comprise the majority of the workforce.

Additionally, mobile learning is on the rise and will become mainstream within the next decade. The proliferation of smartphones and their gradual price erosion means that such devices are swiftly becoming the gadget of choice for young professionals. This puts a very powerful tool into their hands which can become an even more powerful learning enabler when combined with the right applications.

As demonstrated by Apple's App Store and the Android Marketplace, however, there is a bewildering array of applications already available today and the number is growing meteorically. As L&D applications are developed, it is going to be essential for L&D to sort the wheat from the chaff in order to get the right mix of learning applications tempered with deploying a sensible suite of applications that does not overwhelm the user and yet delivers a flexible and scalable learning platform.

L&D's role must therefore change to keep pace with these technological and demographic changes. This represents an opportunity for the L&D function to drive and enable strategic changes within their organisations that will impact underlying culture and attitudes towards learning.

L&D has a key role to play in spearheading a transition from a more formal learning environment to one which enables the user to continuously learn, wherever they might be, whenever they need to, with easy to assimilate bite-sized content. Such changes need to be made in partnership with key business decision makers and will need buy in across the organisation, from senior management through to line managers and, ultimately, the end-users.

Once a long-term strategy is in place, L&D must ensure that the right tools are available at the right time to support the strategy, and ensure that their suitability is tested before widespread deployment within the organisation.

Thought leaders at ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) have made some interesting predictions for the future.

 

With the rise of peer-to-peer learning enabled by social networking tools, we could see measures being put in place to allow L&D to determine which content is most in demand by looking at the most popular content viewed and assembling formal learning courses from the already contributed content. Essentially, this means that learning functions could take on a new role of being knowledge management owners.

ASTD also believes that during the next 10 years the learning function's focus will shift to accreditation, with less emphasis on the learning process itself. As the amount of knowledge required to perform a job moves more and more to instant access, people will be less likely to prove their credentials by having an internal corporate training completion on their personnel records. Instead, it is feasible that a key role for the learning function will be to set the standards of performance required to achieve accreditation, install systems for enabling achievement of that accreditation, and track completion.

A number of our clients agree with this, stating that their employees feel that they would like to gain more recognition for the continuous learning that is becoming more and more common within their jobs and that there is little time to work towards formal qualifications such as a Masters or MBA.

Clearly, both L&D providers and the L&D function will be facing some of their greatest challenges yet over the next 10 years and embracing emerging technology and what the learner wants is going to be critical to success and survival in a new era for training.