elearning,ASTD,rapid elearning,recession

And more inclusive? I am allowed to dream once in a while.

I was in Washington DC to attend the ASTD conference earlier this month and was lucky to catch this great interview on TV with Anne Mulcahy, CEO Xerox Corporation, Eric Schmidt, CEO Google and James W. Owens, CEO Caterpillar. The 3 CEOs spend most of time analyzing the current business environment and how its is affecting their specific business. They also gave some insight as to how these great corporations see the world at the end of the recession.

The first key takeaway from the interview was that while there was no consensus to when the recession will end, they all agreed that the world that we are going to emerge in will be very different than the one that we went in.

The second key takeaway is the growing realization that the business world will grow more global and not less and the ability to globalize operations and market reach will become significantly more essential for success than it is today.

While at ASTD, meeting the learning vendors on the exhibition floor, one gets the feeling that there is a increasing demand for consultancy services around "how-do-we-more-with-less" and "how-do-we-do-things-differently".Also metquite a few people who approached us with a common problem "Have a mandate to move to eLearning-how do I get there?"

Travel budgets have been cut most aggressively – do not have the official data from ASTD, but it seemed that every other person we met was from DC, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Last year at San Diego we had a large contingent from India, China – this time the only foreigners I met was from South America and Mexico, besides a really interesting Danish professor who tries hard to look at the ADDIE model upside down (material for another post!).

Companies – well most of them will survive this recession. But, they will be doing so by monitoring their expenses and realizing that they can deliver the same amount by spending less. The buying public would be expected to spend once again, but will spend differently. China, Brazil, India will spend more, the developed world will possibly spend differently. So top line and bottom lines will again grow but expect the drivers to be different.

Put this together and we are looking at a major change – in attitude, skill sets, and cross-cultural sensitiveness. I came across a lot more companies in the cultural training business this time at ASTD that I thought I did in San Diego. In an earlier post I talked about the changing demographics in the workplace and potential impact it would have in how we deliver training to them – some people are talking about the death of the course and the classroom. I believe though these obituaries are premature, the trends are not.

Learning’s roadmap from classroom to eLearning will happen driven by the forces of economy (travel costs etc.), globalisation (more travel costs), workforce mobility (scheduling headaches etc). Green learning would be driven by technology addressing economic and social concerns of the organisation.

The younger workforce also does not care much for sysnchronous communication, and embraces async. methods – learning communications would be no different. While both sync. as well as async. will be expected to co-exists, the learning hours will trend significantly towards async. if not already.

Technology acceptance and comfort amongst Boomers differed from country to country, which possibly was a hindrance for spread of eLearning across the regions. But, as Internet pulled the world closer over the last decade, the younger folks in India and China have computer literacy levels which rivals those in the western world. Learning departments can now deliver content uniformly across a globally dispersed workforce.

The next challenge is localization and cultural sensitiveness/relevance in content. It would be important to create content in a manner which will facilitate localization services (technology or manual), and content development tool should have architectures to support this need.

The cultural part potentially will need human intervention through local maintenance of a global content. This would indicate that the content maintenance process needs to be in a scripting-free rapid frame work, else the cost of content re-engineering would be prohibitive.

I suspect a lot of learning strategies in most organizations has grown in incrementally and tactically over the years. The great churn that we are witnessing in the business environment allows us to take this opportunity to refactor the current learning platform  or indeed ring in a new platform instead – which is strategically aligned to deliver the business goals, leveraging the technology trends that we are witnessing today, and aimed at addressing the needs of the changing workforce.