Preparing for the Future of Learning at Work

Jay Cross organized an Ignite session in which a few people presented 20 slides for 15 seconds each, so five minutes in total (this is very similar to Pecha Kucha, which is now copyrighted).

It was quite hard to capture the gist of these short presentations, but I attempted it anyway.

Sann Rene Glaza from Toyota presented on increasing mobility in Europe: “Language on the move”. First example is the old Yugoslavia: it used to be one country, but now it is many countries. People are really starting to move around and they will take their technology with them. Do you want your customers to be educated in the same way as your employees? Geographical boundaries and inequality between different countries make keeping up with the changing technology dimensions quite hard.

Jack Wills spoke against the HR department. What are they? Obstructive, self serving, opiniated?! HR is a relatively young term from the 60s. This was a very funny talk where he compared the “management speak” surrounding HR to what he would consider to be the reality. It is a solution from the USA that is hunting for the problem. The reality is that they increase bureaucracy and promote litigation fear. Get rid of them! They impede everything! If you talk to them they add real value to the bottom line, but they cost 876 GBP per employee. What do they do for learning and development: they are killing it!

Laura Overton from Towards Maturity, says that L&D must limber up to be prepared for what is coming to us tomorrow. We as learning professionals are too disconnected from our businesses and do not have enough understanding of the business itself. First thing we need to do is “cut the clutter”. We don’t have to wait for the future, we can start now and make a move from being course providers to performance consultants. She suggest we need to download our exercise manual, the 2011 benchmark report, today!

Mehdi Tounsi from Speexx talked about the future of learning in a global workforce. He talked about the need to be competent in transacting with a very diverse group of professionals (from an age perspective, language, cultural background). Language is an important part of this. “Help my boss is in the room” was on his last slide: good one!

Finally Charles Jennings and Sarah Frame presented Nic Laycock’s slides. He has a dream about creating a fully technology enabled learning process that is research based, integrated into the workflow, with vision and immersivity. This has to be a revolution, because evolution will not be fast enough. Like other revolutions it will not be comfortable. It is all about openness. It needs investments of thinking, time and money. They are asking for help at developing “Immersivity” which they are doing for Eskom.