Really?
You care what I think is going to happen in 2012? I'm touched.
Well I don't have the massive reach of ASTD or of Bersin or Training Magazine, but I do read a lot and talk to people.
So here is my big prediction for 2012.
Learning Pro's like me will be looking at ways to get out of the way better.
By this I mean that we will see a continued move towards informal learning built on social platforms. We are just a couple of years away from Millennials becoming the majority of the workforce, and it's clear that incoming millennials are the workplace learners of the current time. Yes I know that there are 3 (0r 4) generations in the workplace at the moment but the boomers are on their way out of the workforce, and the Gen X'ers are hitting levels when they don't get to do much learning as they are supposedly good at their jobs already.
So as these are our 'customers' we need to look at the environment that they thrive in.
It is digital, socially networked, mobile and googled!
These learners will not sit in a classroom and be told stuff! They will find out the stuff they need to do the job they want to do. They will use their friends, their peers, their colleagues. They will go to Google, to YouTube to Facebook and Twitter to look for it and the only reason they won't do it on the iPhones is if they have Droids!
One of the people I've learned the most from in my time as a Learning Pro is Thiagi. I've taken his concept of Rapid Instructional Design (well I learned it from him so I'm crediting him) and boiled it down to what I refer to as "The Lazy Trainer' method. Rather than have an instructional designer spend hours prizing knowledge from a SME to boil it down into small chunks to create courseware so a learner can learn some of what the ID thinks the SME uses to do the job, just set the learners loose on the SME and tell them to get the information for themselves.
Millennials are self-directed, self starting, social learning machines.
Let's get out of their way and let them do it.
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