Corporate learning in the digital age

Learning in many organisations is going through radical change. Some are ditching their training rooms in favour of digital delivery of content, and bosses that are forward thinking are investing in social learning, social media and mobile devices to support the learning of their employees. When I was invited to speak at a Human Resources and Corporate Learning conference in Cologne, Germany I did an interview about how organisations are remodelling their learning strategies around new and emerging technology. The interview, by Bettina Wallbrecht and Stefanie Hornung for Zukunft Personal is also available in a more extended version in German at this link. We started by discussing the rapid development of new technologies such as social media and mobile phones, and their implementation in work place learning.

What do these new developments mean for trainers and how do they adapt to these changes?

Some trainers find it hard to keep up because they think it is too fast and too complicated for them to understand. But any teacher or trainer can exploit the power and potential of these new technologies. Many of them are free and easy to use, and there is a definite pedagogy underpinning the use of these technologies. They just have to be aware that there are privacy and identity issues, issues of safety and content management. I urge every teacher and trainer to try these technologies out in a safe environment to see how they work and what they can do for their learners.

Can we apply this also to corporate learning? Do companies use these technologies, and how?

Oh yes. I can give you at least one example: Just recently I was speaking at a conference in London (Learning Technologies). 450 people attended representing many major companies, from for example, banks, manufacturing companies, the police, the military and government departments. Many of these 450 people were already doing something new with technology and wanted to hear all about the latest digital media and technologies. I think that it is a growing trend that corporate trainers are tapping into the power of these new media and technologies.

Do companies support the use of these technologies by their employees?

Well, corporate barriers are a problem - for instance when the management says you are not allowed to use Facebook because it's against company policy. I say to them, if you ban Facebook, you are losing one of the greatest opportunities to gain social credibility and social traction that you are going to have: the power of social media to connect people professionally as well as personally. The ability to tap into a professional network is one of the most valuable that an employee can have. So don't turn your backs on social media in the workplace. Rather than block it, facilitate it in a way that it becomes a benefit to both your employees and your company.

You once said that learning transcends the boundaries of the classroom. Do you see problems when professionals, for example specialists in a certain field, connect with others from different companies?

Companies obviously want to protect their secrets, they have to - to a certain extent - because if they don't, their rivals will come in and steal their ideas and capitalise on them.  But there are ways of sharing information, there are also ways of marketing where messages become viral, enabling you to exploit the power and potential of social media, to sell your ideas to people. You see, all of my content is licensed under Creative Commons, which means that it can be shared and repurposed under the same licence with which I have licensed it. Sometimes people translate my blog posts into other languages, and this way I get a huge audience which I would otherwise not have had. This is what companies have to see: They may wish to protect some things, but they may also wish to open up their ideas to sharing, to gain more credibility, more effective marketing and more efficient promotion of their ideas and products.

In Germany, HR professionals have to face the demographic change. Are the new learning technologies just a new way to learn for digital natives or also for older people? 

I don't believe that younger people are more adept in using technology just because they were born after 1980 and I don't want to categorise people this way. In my view, it is all about context rather than about age. What matters is what uses you see for the technology and then there is a willingness to learn how to use it. When you understand that these technologies are for everybody to use, demographics such as age don't really matter that much.

How far are all these changes we talked about international phenomena?

In one sense, there are huge differentials between how people use technology to learn to connect with each other, to communicate, to do commerce and business. If you go to Singapore, a small country where there is a population of people who are very much immersed in technologies, because it is one of the most wired - or wireless - countries in the world. You can't compare that to the Gambia in Western Africa, another very small nation where they don't even have a power (electrical) infrastructure for most of their country. But in other ways everybody is in the same boat, because everybody wants to learn, everyone wants to have a good life. The needs, aspirations and hopes are the same, but our opportunities are not the same. The future is unevenly distributed, which means tat the future is not here yet.



This is a brief video I did in 2012 at Learning Technologies that is related to theme of companies integrating new technologies into their corporate learning strategy (and how to get around some of the perceived barriers in organisations). Look out for my comments on positive deviance and the IPD - Innovation Prevention Department!

Photo by Niklas Wikström on Flickr
Video courtesy of Martin Couzins


Corporate learning in the digital age by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.