How consumer tech trends affect corporate training & learner expectations

We will all look back on 2020 as a truly transformative year and for the corporate training world it could be a catalyst for an upsurge in demand for skills based e-learning resources available at the point of need in the flow of work.

L&D leaders will currently be focused on business continuity and prioritising meeting immediate training needs, virtualising wherever possible, but will also start to look optimistically (and hopefully) towards the recovery period. The impact of COVID-19 will have dramatic consequences on our global markets, economies and public health but it’s legacy at least, might have a lasting positive impact on society, work, technology, leisure and consumer habits.

Everyone is going to have to embrace agility and adaptability to survive in the new world, be it businesses, individuals and the learning tech vendors. The upshot of this could see more businesses seeking to equip people with critical future fit skills for a constantly changing and uncertain world.

It could see learners demanding e-learning solutions that need to meet immediate learning needs in the flow of work and a stronger appetite for lifelong learning that prepares them to adapt to new challenges. Learning Tech vendors might also choose to adopt a more skills-focussed approach to their solutions currently best represented by the LXP.

The new decade will almost certainly follow the pattern of the last 20 years in that where consumer tech trends go, workplace training will follow. This diagram (adapted from ‘How Corporate Training Has Evolved’ by Josh Bersin) shows the evolution of workplace training pitched against the progression of consumer tech trends from the advent of Google, over 20 years ago, through the rise of consumer and social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Netflix.

Back in 1998 when Google launched, the typical corporate training platform would have been primarily a training event management system with catalogues of e-learning modules for learners to browse and complete. The platform would have been administrator focussed but also facilitated self-paced asynchronous learning and marked the beginning of the traditional LMS (see this post on the LMS vs LXP for a comparison and detailed discussion on the benefits of each).

Many workplace training systems still sit in a time warp of 20 years ago. These platforms will be used as an e-earning platform where learners can access their compliance e-modules and face-to-face training can be booked and managed.

This isn’t to say that these organisations are behind the times, as corporate training environments will always lag behind consumer trends, but what this diagram demonstrates is that corporate training and technology platforms evolve in line with the trends of the popular consumer platforms, user expectation and current learning philosophies.

To put the impact and rapid rise of modern consumer tech trends into perspective, Facebook managed to reach 50 million users in just 3.5 years and now has over 2 billion users (just over a quarter of the entire world’s population) whereas the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million people.

With the exponential growth in consumer grade platforms (and apps) and with 65% of the world’s population owning a smartphone (that’s more people than have access to clean water), it’s easy to see how user expectations have risen so rapidly and how therefore our learners expect to be able to learn and consume information in the moment they need it, from the device in their pocket and in bitesize engaging formats.

So, what should you be doing as a business, to start to transform your digital learning provision and learning culture for 2020 and beyond?

2 Key steps to transforming your learning provision & learning culture for 2020 and beyond

1.      Develop your digital learning & development strategy

If you want to engage your learners, change behaviours and make learning something your learners ‘want’ to do rather than ‘need’ to do then you need to choose the right platforms, tools and learning content. To do this you need to develop a comprehensive digital L&D strategy that identifies the learning solutions you need to implement to meet the business needs and priorities.  

The strategy should involve a thorough learning needs analysis with your stakeholders to determine the current provision vs the learning culture you’re aiming for. A solid strategy will uncover the needs of the business alongside your learner’s expectations and provide a blueprint for the learning ecosystem you need to build. It also gives you a starting point of the priority projects to start on and how you’ll measure their success.

2.      Start building your learning culture

Start moving towards a culture for learning more aligned with the expectations of your learners. (Read more about the 5 essential transitions in any digital learning transformation here). Firstly begin by improving the provision that already exists, plugging any gaps, redesigning training delivery formats with the tools and platforms already at your disposal whilst identifying the tools and platforms you need to enhance your offering.

Based on this model, for your workplace training provision to sit around 2012 (the dawn of the Netflix era) where consumers access and consume content on demand and favour video over more traditional e-learning styles and long form formats you would need to use more video, mobile and self-authored (user generated) content, appropriate for the 70:20:10 model of learning and development and which would suit user expectations of learning on demand, and learning being more embedded into their job.

The aspiration for the 2020’s would be for a learning culture to be fully embedded with your learners able to access digital learning and learn in the flow of work. You can get here by following the ‘Improve – Embed – Shift Culture – Engage – Internal Activists’ model.

The user experience should be so seamless that learners wouldn’t be aware of logging into the learning platform and relevant learning assets can be surfaced more easily when needed (possibly via an LXP). There would be a learning ecosystem comprised of platforms and tools all contributing the overall learner experience. Insights and data would be driving new learning initiatives and the development of existing ones.

For expert help with developing a digital L&D strategy to support your digital L&D transformation contact Learn Fox for an initial chat to discuss how we can best support you.