Annual predictions for Learning and Development 2013.

Annually I provide my 7 top predictions for Learning and Development. Here are my Learning and Development trends for 2013:

·       E / M learning are expected to be worth a whopping US$107 billion globally by 2015. My predictions are that digital learning is going to escalate in South Africa to new heights. But I don’t think in a way that is currently on the learning and development map. The industry is moving more towards mobile device learning. This includes mobile phones, tabs and even devices that are not yet available. The way how we learn has changed. E learning as definition however would need to be defined more specifically.

·       Having fun in learning content. This range from online games to virtual classrooms where a lot more interaction is required from learners to experience learning in a fun way. This ranges from video clips (You tube being the second biggest search engine currently) If our country can host the bandwidth we will be moving very quickly in this direction.

·       Learning and development jobs are becoming more non-specialists. As an L and D person, you need to be equipping with skills ranging from people management, designing, consulting, and training. All with a focus to be more customer specific. Skills that are seeming to top the range of requirements to complete your job, is very specialised. Having an in-depth knowledge of learning tools and performance enhancing tricks are becoming critical. Organisations wants to know that you can actually make a difference in what people are doing once they attend training. This also means an insight into business, its processes and its systems.  Asking my peers what opening jobs most require, the answer is always passion!

·       Learning analysis is very closely linked to Knowledge Management. We have an overload of data available, but we don’t seem to know where to find the information in an organizational context or we simply do not know how it affects training programs. My predictions are that this is going to continue to be a hot topic in 2013 and beyond. We need to understand how the content that is being developed can be quickly distributed across the organizations, and kept up to date easily. People need to know how to find information specific to the organization, and learning and development is taking on this responsibility more and more.

·       Social learning, will 2013 be the year we finally “get it” that we only truly learn from one another if the context has been created to do so? Will we create “save spaces” for people to learn and make mistakes? Will we build in reflections and on-the-job reflections time in our content? Will be sit back and say “did this actually work, what do you think?”

·       Partnering with talent management is also on the increase with my group of peers. There seems to be a fascination with HR in linking talent management very closely with training. This however, I suspect, is not every organization with political agendas top priority without being a window dressing story.

·       Massive Online Open Courses are on the increase. Specialist in your area, why not create a YouTube video on the topic and invite massive amounts of people to watch you “do your thang” about what you are passionate about? It’s out there and it happening and its normally free.

 

In general I also suspect that we will start to see more usage of technology that can assist Learning and Development specialist in completing their jobs. We will see an increase in how connected we truly are when we start to incorporate Facebook and Twitter accounts in our training sessions (maybe create a learning event via Facebook or using a specific hash tag to create tweets about learning as it happens. Said this before but YouTube is truly becoming a great quick learning tool as a proper search engine. I also suspect that content development will move away from “standards” set out by companies in creating uniform look and feel content. I am seeing more and more creative professionals in the learning and development sphere that are starting to dictate a more relaxed, open minded and progressive way of looking at training content. They are starting to challenge the way how content is being developed.

 

Exciting times!