On Tuesday ASTD staff were fortunate enough to have Tony O'Driscoll, lead learning strategist with IBM's Center for Advanced Learning, come to talk to us and replay a presentation he had made to our Benchmarking Forum.
A learning futurist, Tony is widely published and quoted. His presentation was quite interesting and enlightening.
A couple of crucial tidbits I picked up:
- By the year 2010, the codified information base of the world is expected to double every 11 hours (that information base includes anything digital: internet, intranets, extranets, blogs, and so forth). Talk about information overload!
- We need to stop using technology to create information and start using it to enable knowledge.
- 80-85 percent of learning is on the job rather than formal training.
- "[Trainers'] competition is Google" (workers are getting information as they need it from the search engine).
- Currently we're doing a lot of "paving cow paths" (automating old ways of learning instead of coming up with new ways).
- We need to change the focus from bringing the worker to the learning to bringing the learning to the worker.
- We need a "self-help, self-service" model of learning.
Want more? See these two recent articles co-authored by Tony:
"Adapt or Die: The Strategic Role of Learning in the On-Demand Enterprise" in Learning Circuits
"Workflow Learning Gets Real" in Training
And to learn more about what IBM is doing with on-demand learning, see the free (requires registration) article in T+D's May issue, "A New Shade of Big Blue: IBM Reinvents Its Workforce."
