In Aprender Magazine, Setembro 2020
Who led the digital transformation of your company? A) CEO, B) CTO, C) Innovation Team, D) Covid-19? This was a joke going on in social media during the worldwide pandemic crisis.
Experts on market trends from many different institutions (e.g. McKinsey, Gartner, PwC, Forbes, Scientific American) say that Artificial Intelligence will substitute significant parts of the human workforce by 2030. It seems that the crisis accelerated the adoption of more technology in our daily routine and prepared the ground for this future.
Not only the use of technology experienced a boom during the last months, but the learning and development business also underwent a major transformation. With the widespread use of video conferencing the access to training became fast, easy, and flexible. And the offer expanded. Never before has there been so much choice of content and form: free webinars, vodcasts, blogs, paid online trainings on established platforms, virtual academies, and digital team building. The list goes on and on.
The offer is so immense that it is overwhelming. One does not know anymore which webinar to choose and which virtual conference to attend. People got so overstimulated with the amount of free resources that a learning fatigue set in. A learning fatigue that might have more challenges to it.
First of all, the commitment to keep a scheduled training opportunity is decreasing. As virtual training sessions or webinars are usually shorter in time than the conventional face-to-face trainings, it is just a brief appointment in the calendar and easy to cancel. The answer to this challenge is obvious: the more relevant the topic the higher the commitment. So, learning opportunities need to be individually relevant.
Second, many free webinars have been used to promote other paid services, leaving the attendees with a feeling of little gain for their time investment. The risk might be that people overgeneralize and start disliking or doubting the value of any kind of online intervention. To overcome this challenge one question needs a clear answer “what’s in it for me?”.
And the third challenge is that the ease of access to knowledge (not skill) might create an illusion of mastery: I know so I can. But in my experience common knowledge is not common practice. So we are creating a workforce that thinks they know it all and therefore can do it all, but the knowledge does not make it into practice. But repeating the same topics over and over again just adds to the fatigue.
The success of the L&D business in the future will depend on how well the offer matches the individual needs and guarantees skill development, rather than knowledge sharing. And to create this match can very well be a task for A.I.
