If you don’t evolve with time then you won’t last long, this school of thought applies to all levels. Corporations are first to adopt new and emerging technologies and trends, in order to survive in the business, you have to stay on top of your game.
Training and learning are an important part of corporate life, especially today when new technologies are emerging by the hour. People working at big corporations need to upskill themselves on a regular basis, gone are the days when one training session was all that you had to go through to do your job efficiently.
Let’s dive deeper into how corporate learning has evolved in the past few decades?
Breaking down the learning evolution:
It’s hard to imagine a time when big corporations used to build physical universities to train their workforce on multiple aspects like sales, computer engineering, customer services, etc. We are talking about the 1980s when the internet hadn’t exploded and computer systems were limited, corporate learning was facilitated by experts in the domain who taught the employees in person.
In early 2000, the internet exploded and this called for a technological up-gradation in almost every industry and the learning industry wasn’t immune to such technological advancement. This gave birth to the process of e-learning; the physical universities were being shut down and replaced using virtual universities. Corporations spend a huge sum on training and development programs, the adaption of the virtual universities was quick also due to the fact that it saved a lot on money in the recessionary phase for the companies.
The process of e-learning was tedious and monotonous given the lack of advancement during the time. Switching from face to face training to computer-based training was not easy to adopt for people working at corporations. E-learning needed a good amount of money to be spent on content creation and there were many technical glitches initially. As the market matured it was adopted widely by corporations and all big companies had their e-learning portals.
As the technology evolved further and new ideas came into existence in the form of YouTube; video content got widely popular and people wanted more of that because it was more like an upgraded version of in-person training. People didn’t want to switch pages on the e-learning portal and teach themselves, this disrupted the e-learning market to a great extent.
With the growth of digital media, life became fast; news didn’t have to come early in the morning, real-time experiences were valued more. With the proliferation of social media, people were more inclined towards instant gratification, they wanted things faster and this became a habit.
People started preferring short and crisp content that could help them immediately. They no longer wanted to know everything about the subject; they just wanted to pass the examination. This led to the birth of micro-video formats, these were short videos created to serve a specific learning purpose, and it had a very narrow perspective when it comes to imparting relevant knowledge. People at work wanted to spend more time doing the work than learning about how to do the work.
The idea of micro-videos was to provide contextual information, more easily discoverable and more readily consumed by the user. The next phase of the learning evolution was employee-centric; LinkedIn and some other companies were the harbinger of this learning evolution that was more user-centric. In the contemporary scenario, soft skills are more into the limelight, people have realized the importance of emotional intelligence and skills like problem-solving, leadership, and communication, etc. have taken a front seat in the skill hierarchy.
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