Group items tagged

This pattern of behavior (and availability of technology), of course, has been further enhanced by the availability of social networking, which led us to the fourth phase shown above.  Today’s employee has access to formal training, overwhelming amounts of other information, and actual human beings online.  Adding this all together, the corporate learning landscape has undergone a dramatic change.  Now, when someone needs to “learn” something, we must consider the various ways they can gain these skills or information:  they can go to a class, they can take an online course, they can look up support information on the web, they can read a book, or they can find someone who knows what to do and get help.  And we, as L&D professionals, must “formalize” this informal learning environment and make sure we align our investments toward talent management and the needs to build deep levels of skill.

This shift has created tremendous challenges for the corporate training department.  Our research shows that 68% of knowledge workers now feel that their biggest learning problem is an “overwhelming volume of information.”   This information exists in many formats, it is often out of date, and they are not sure how to find what they need.  In some sense the need for “formal” training is greater than ever (you can make sure you get the right information presented in the right way).  Yet in fact, now corporate training professionals must grapple with a whole new set of issues:  how do I create a complete “learning environment” (not a learning program) which supports this new world of formal and informal learning?

And the shift has impacted our profession as well.  Our research members now tell us that the biggest help they need is not in developing new content, but rather building the organizational learning culture and understanding the new skills and disciplines they need to be effective.

As you can see, the framework is multi-faceted.   If you would like to walk through it in detail, I encourage you to read our in-depth whitepaper.  Briefly, the framework has six main areas:   Learning Programs (the solution-oriented training solutions you deliver), Audiences and Problems (a clear segmentation of your audiences and their specific needs), Learning Approaches (the four ways in which learning solutions are developed and delivered), Learning Disciplines (the things you as an L&D professional must now know to stay current in this area), Tools & Technology (the vast array of technology you can rely on to build and deliver these solutions),  and Learning Culture (the underlying business processes, management processes, and talent management programs which support enterprise learning).

ata is being collected, presented, and acted upon in real time. The scale of participation has increased by orders of magnitude.

lifestream

All of a sudden, we’re not using search via a keyboard and a stilted search grammar, we’re talking to and with the Web. It’s getting smart enough to understand some things (such as where we are) without us having to tell it explicitly. And that’s just the beginning.

But it’s important to realize that machine learning techniques apply to far more than just sensor data.

information shadows

geotagging

The smartphone revolution has moved the Web from our desks to our pockets. Collective intelligence applications are no longer being driven solely by humans typing on keyboards but, increasingly, by sensors.

With more users and sensors feeding more applications and platforms, developers are able to tackle serious real-world problems.

The Web is no longer a collection of static pages of HTML that describe something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an "information shadow," an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications.

It’s easy to forget that only 15 years ago, email was as fragmented as social networking is today, with hundreds of incompatible email systems joined by fragile and congested gateways. One of those systems – internet RFC 822 email – became the gold standard for interchange.

They thus turn what at first appeared to be unstructured into structured data.