According to IDC learning industry analyst Cushing Anderson, “Respondents to Chief Learning Officer magazine’s Business Intelligence Board survey view the coming year with guarded optimism. Most of them acknowledge the threats posed by economic problems, but also see opportunities for improvement.”

But what is particularly interesting are the changes in industry priorities for the coming year. Three areas have increased their standings in the Top 10 Priorities: informal learning, knowledge management, and sales training.

• “Informal learning is up four spots, while measurement (fourth place in 2008) is no longer in the top 10. (It landed at 11 this year.)”
• “Knowledge management also continues a steady upward trend, up three this year, and up six spots over the past two years.”
• “Sales training made an appearance in the top 10 for 2009, although it did not in 2008. Sales training has increased in importance in light of the economy. As one executive put it, “In the tight economy, the performance of our sales team is the company’s top priority. We are refocusing much of our efforts to drive productivity in the sales teams.”

And, when asked which topics should be given more attention by the training industry, “…the top two choices were knowledge management and informal learning. Given the high impact that these two activities have on training programs, this comes as no surprise. However, social networking was the third-place choice.” Although undefined, or defined variously, “Social networking also is seen as another avenue for high-impact informal learning and one that should be managed proactively rather than haphazardly.”

These findings are indeed gratifying to see, since they have served as guiding principles behind the development of the Altus Collaborative Knowledge Sharing solution for the last several years.

• Underlying the Altus informal learning solution is the principle of creating the shortest path from experts to learners—hence, our recording of expert presentations with no instructional designers as intermediaries.
• When these presentations are aggregated into a full-text searchable repository, they collectively serve as a knowledge management system that enables people to quickly find whatever knowledge they need whenever they need it—and at the exact point of interest.
• The effective adaptation of social networking technology and behavior has been achieved by adding a number of features that enable people to interact with the content, form communities of interest, and collaboratively share what they know.
• And when the power of this solution is applied to enabling direct and indirect sales, significant and demonstrable ROI has been achieved in client companies including Cisco Systems, IBM, and NetApp.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Learning 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.