Disruption in Corporate Learning and Development

Ebrahim Mookhtiar – 10-Oct-2018

The new learning corporate landscape or popularly called as ‘Digital Learning’ has been re-defining itself since its advent. This industry is over $140 billion in size and it crosses over $300 billion marketplace in the world of education and professional development. Digital learning has enabled businesses and employees to educate themselves anytime, anywhere. For instance, people are learning so much everyday by just logging on to their social media page or referring to internet websites. People are learning through multiple sources – the need is to get all these sources aggregated under one roof and personalize the experience of learning as per the individual’s preferences.

The new age learning hubs include knowledge management, open source content, peer networks, search engines, expert forums and sometimes formal classroom training. In the present scenario, personalizing experiences for the learner is of key importance for most companies. Tools such as Google, YouTube, Workplace by Facebook, Slack, and others have transformed the learning environment and believe that ‘learning needs to be delivered where people are!’ Josh Bersin from Deloitte, a futurist on L&D says, “Intelligent Personalized Machine Driven’ learning experiences are going to make the next wave of learning platforms by 2020”.

Donald Taylor, a leading L&D Analyst, recently conducted a survey of L&D leaders and discovered that it’s important that the companies “architect a meaningful set of programs around macro and micro learning.” Today’s learning is more about “flow” rather than “instruction”. With the attention spans of individuals decreasing, “micro-learning” is the future learning of tomorrow. Micro courses allow learners to quickly read through, view and consume the learning content in 10 minutes or less. For example, if the learner needs to learn about a concept, he/she can just log on to YouTube to view a video that would explain him/her the concept in simple language with examples.

This suggests that instead of developing your own content, it’s better to curate content! There are a lot of websites or URLs that can be intelligently bought to the learner as per their needs. Imagine a financial expert who uploads an important tip (by writing an article or making a video) on the latest changes in tax filing on Slack or Workplace by Facebook and shares it with his/her workgroup is a classic example of curated digital learning. The new pathway of integrating tools for content discovery, communication, messaging and AI-based intelligence is paving way for next generation learners.

Tim Quinlan, Director of Digital Platform for Learning at Intel believes that as L&D budgets are getting stringent, it’s important to curate content instead of creating it. At Intel, his learning team built an internal digital platform for the employees thinking of them as customers. With the help of his team members, Tim developed a learning experience without storing content or authoring it in any way that enabled users to “browse, read, consume, and rate content using intelligent recommender systems”.

The new digital learning world has also taken into account the traditional learner’s way of learning. A traditional learner might find it difficult to understand content through the help of curated content, and hence, virtual coaching is another option that the companies can adopt. It is believed that the virtual AI based coach will play a role in connecting with the learner. Along with Virtual Coaching, Virtual Reality (VR) is also something that holds a promising future. VR could make experiential learning possible for learners and “reinforce learning by doing”.

Hence, as we realize the pain points in the L&D industry and the decreasing use of the Learning Management System (LMS); the LMS will soon only become a tool for record keeping and compliance. In today’s day, we need to concentrate more on an “employee-centric” design. So, it’s time to break down the walls and learn in collaboration and infuse new skills sets and perspectives into the L&D industry.

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