How Learning and Development will change in 2012

Learning and development will change in 2012. This will be more than an incremental change. It will be a qualitative shift to a new approach.

That new approach can be summed up in one word: performance.

For too long, Learning and Development has focused on its own efficiency. How many courses could the department deliver, to how many people, over what period? And far too often the department physically separated itself from the rest of the organization – in the basement, or even in a separate building.

This will change in 2012, but strangely the shift will only bring us back to the most natural way of learning: from each other, at work.

Originally, learning was absolutely coupled to performance. Indeed, it was a natural part of work. This was before there were any complex workplace training programmes. In the pre-industrial world, learning at work largely consisted of watching others while at work, asking questions and receiving guidance. This meant that learning took place entirely in the correct context – in the workplace.

The richness of this learning experience was largely lost in the industrial era when workplace learning moved to training delivered largely through courses in the classroom, removed from the context of the workplace.

In 2012, the availability of the right technologies – in particular hand-held devices – will change all this.

This is more than simply saying that mobile learning will continue to grow in 2012. It will, but more than that will be a shift from “Learning and Development” to “Performance and Knowledge”. In other words, the emphasis of the L&D department will be increasingly on performance, and delivering the knowledge to support that performance, whether the person remembers it or not.

And what will people access through their portable devices? Some of it will still be courses. Some of it, however, will be information resources curated by the L&D department and made available through effective systems that are designed to provide the knowledge to support performance.

And online, people will also access something else: each other. Sometimes this can be through a phone call, but more often today it is via chat, through forums or through expert help. In other words, technology in 2012 will enable us to return learning at work to what it always was – a memorable experience made richer by taking place in the context of work.

Thanks,
Ara Ohanian
CEO, CERTPOINT Systems