How is training likely to change in the future

For example, if trainees need to learn how to run tests at a data center, delivering the content via AR enables employees to experience the environment without being on-site at the data center. Additionally, as consumer preferences continue to evolve, delivering content via AR and VR will be crucial to keep learners engaged in a world where attention spans continue to shrink and users have come to expect the same digital, hands-on and interactive content they consume in their day-to-day lives.

Technology trends have actively influenced newer generations in terms of education. These so-called digital natives are reluctant to embrace old pedagogy. Instead, the eagerness of employees has forced organizations to replace passive learning with more interactive learning experiences. Secondly, augmented reality has the power to enhance the world we perceive through our senses.

Instructional designers are creating hybrid learning experiences that bridge the physical and the digital world. These experiences help employees process information by adding a virtual layer of information on top of manuals, charts, machinery and tools through the features of their mobile devices such as camera, gyroscope and GPS navigation. Finally, millennials have been exposed to technology since they were very young. This over-stimulation has conditioned them to be more distracted, impatient and sometimes underwhelmed.

These modern learners place a high value on engaging learning environments that are able to attract their attention. Virtual reality offers unique immersive training that directs their senses to the educational experience. Realistic settings that simulate real-life scenarios can be used to develop skills where context, engagement and decision-making are imperative in the learning path.

Potential benefits of AI and ML extend well beyond increased productivity. Companies that embrace these new technologies will quickly gain a more competitive edge with better-informed decision-making, greater operational efficiency, cost savings, and greater returns on their investment because:. By connecting artificial intelligence and deep learning back-end systems in real-time to significantly more engaging immersive learning experiences through augmented and virtual reality interfaces, much more topical, current and accurate learning will take place.

Imagine virtual experiential team training, or procedural scenarios overlaid through augmented reality onto your real-world environments.

By connecting these advanced technologies to critical training objectives, true learning instead of rote memorization or training on obsolete materials will become the expected or even demanded approach to support future life-long learning methods. A great example of augmented reality is providing salespeople with details on a client, based on their location.

The budgets and infrastructure to produce most of these types of simulated environments for a practical application is still cost prohibitive for most of us. However, I think AI is already changing the world of learning in two distinct ways. One is that many of the jobs that include repetitive type tasks are and will continue to be taken over by AI, and AI has already begun to curate learning for us through recommendations and daily learning feeds.

AI is also driving coaching scenarios through chat bots, as well as performance support within an organization where chat bots can point a new user to the right place for their need at the right time. There is a lot of hype around AR, VR and gamification, but these are modalities, not learning strategies.

The reason Skillsoft is investing is that neuroscience research tells us that purposeful, cognitive practice is as valuable as actual performance because the brain stores the information the same way. Skills embed into the brain through the overlapping circuitry engaged by recruiting resources from multiple parts of the brain. Simulations require the brain to use multiple skills simultaneously, facilitating actual application of knowledge. Users, and therefore organizations, benefit from improved retention rates that result from impactful multiple-sensory inputs and immersive learning simulations.

New technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, semantic web and voice-driven interfaces are turning the web into a personal assistant to anyone with an Internet connection. This starts with the real problems that employees face on a daily basis.

Stay up to date on the latest articles, webinars and resources for learning and development. View in Magazine. Emerging technologies have the potential to add context, relevance and personalization to the learning experience. Improving the Feedback Experience — Simon Fowler, Learning Technology Specialist, AchieveForum New experiential learning methods can help organizations improve the feedback experience required for skill development.

Era of Unparalleled Opportunity for Employee Development — Kate Pasterfield, Head of Innovation, Sponge UK The use of emerging technologies in learning has launched an era of unparalleled opportunity when it comes to developing full potential of employees. Whether the traditional programs or new programs will be better at teaching adaptive learning remains to be seen. Many ambitious federal and state programs have fizzled, to produce dismal to no statistical change in the caliber of K education.

Online mediums and self-directed approaches may be limited in effectiveness with certain labor segments unless supplemented by human coaching and support systems. It is true that most online courses require self-direction. But in-person courses may also be self-directed.

This works well for some students but not others. Students who are self-directed often have had a very good foundational education and supportive parents.

They have been taught to think critically and they know that the most important thing you can learn is how to learn.

And they are also are more likely to come from economic privilege. So, not only does the self-direction factor pose a problem for teaching at scale, the fact that a high degree of self-direction may be required for successful completion of coursework towards the new workforce means that existing structures of inequality will be replicated in the future if we rely on these large-scale programs. The problem of future jobs is not one of skills training — it is one of diminishing jobs.

How will we cope with a workforce that is simply irrelevant? Jennifer Zickerman. But in the next decade or two, there is likely to be a significant amount of technological innovation in machine intelligence and personal assistants that takes a real swipe out of the jobs we want humans to have in education, health care, transportation, agriculture and public safety. As for the skills for the employed fraction of advanced countries, I think they will be difficult to teach.

Nathaniel Borenstein. Algorithms, automation and robotics will result in capital no longer needing labor to progress the economic agenda. Labor becomes, in many ways, surplus to economic requirements. By the time the training programs are widely available, the required skills will no longer be required. The whole emphasis of training must now be directed towards personal life skills development rather than the traditional working career-based approach.

There is also the massive sociological economic impact of general automation and AI that must be addressed to redistribute wealth and focus life skills at lifelong learning. We urgently need to explore how to distribute the increasing wealth of complex goods and services our civilization produces to a populace that will be increasingly jobless in the traditional sense.

The current trend of concentrating wealth in the hands of a diminishing number of ultra-rich individuals is unsustainable. All of this while dealing with the destabilizing effects of climate change and the adaptations necessary to mitigate its worst impacts. Some of these experts projected further out into the future, imagining a world where the machines themselves learn and overtake core human emotional and cognitive capacities. Timothy C.

This section features responses by several more of the many top analysts who participated in this canvassing. Following this wide-ranging set of comments on the topic, a much more expansive set of quotations directly tied to the set of four themes begins on Page From the employer perspective, this type of learning will only grow. The automation of human labor will grow significantly. And having a workforce trained in discrete and atomizable bits of skills will be seen as a benefit by employers.

This of course is a terrible, soulless, insecure life for the workers, but since when did that really change anything? There will also be a parallel call for benefits, professional development, and compensation that smooths out the rough patches in this on-demand labor life, but such efforts will lag behind the exploitation of said labor because big business has more resources and big tech moves too fast for human-scale responses of accountability and responsibility.

Look at Linux and open-source development. The world runs on both now, and they employ millions of human beings. Many, or most, of the new open-source programmers building and running our world today are self-taught, or teach each other, to a higher degree than they are educated by formal schooling. Look at Khan Academy and the home-schooling movement, both of which in many ways outperform formal institutional education. This model for employment of self and others will also spread to other professions.

The great educator John Taylor Gatto , who won many awards for his teaching and rarely obeyed curricular requirements, says nearly all attempts to reform education make it worse. We are by nature learning animals. We are each also very different: both from each other and from who we were yesterday. As a society we need to take advantage of that, and nurture our natural hunger for knowledge and productive work while respecting and encouraging our diversity, a fundamental balancing feature of all nature, human and otherwise.

But we will likely see a radical economic disruption in education — using new tools and means to learn and certify learning — and that is the way by which we will manage to train many more people in many new skills. An earlier and more enduring focus on stats and statistical literacy — which can readily be taught using current affairs, for example, analyzing the poll numbers from elections, the claims made by climate change scientists, or even the excellent oral arguments in the Supreme Court Texas abortion law case — would impart skills that transferred well into IT, programming and, especially, security.

About , years ago, Earth experienced its first Cambrian Explosion — a period of rapid cellular evolution and diversification that resulted in the foundation of life as we know it today. We are clearly in the dawn of a new age, one that is marked not just by advanced machines but, rather, machines that are starting to learn how to think.

Soon, those machines that can think will augment humankind, helping to unlock our creative and industrial potential. Some of the workforce will find itself displaced by automation. That includes anyone whose primary job functions are transactional bank tellers, drivers, mortgage brokers. However, there are many fields that will begin to work alongside smart machines: doctors, journalists, teachers.

The most important skill of any future worker will be adaptability. This current Cambrian Explosion of machines will mean diversification in our systems, our interfaces, our code. Workers who have the temperament and fortitude to quickly learn new menu screens, who can find information quickly, and the like will fare well. I do not see the wide-scale emergence of training programs during the next 10 years due to the emergence of smart machines alone.

The jury is very much out on the extent to which acquisition of knowledge and reasoning skills requires human interaction. We now have empirical evidence that a substantial percentage — half or more — can be gained through self-study using computer-assisted techniques. The path forward for society as a whole is strewn with obstacles of self-interest, ignorance, flawed economics, etc. Here I want to focus on other areas.

The issue is not just training but cultural re-evaluation of teaching and healing as highly respected skills. Few of us make anything we use — from the building we live in to the objects we own — and these things are mostly manufactured as cheaply as possible, to be easily bought, discarded, and bought again, in a process of relentless acquisition that often brings little happiness.

Very easily accessible learning for how to fix these things themselves and making it economically rewarding, in the case of a common good — is a simple, basic example of the kind of ubiquitous craft learning that at scale would be enormously valuable. Some of this can be taught online — a key component is also online coordination. Certainly science and technology are important, but we need to refocus liberal education, not ignore it.

History, in all its complexity. Critical thinking — how to debate, how to recognize persuasive techniques, how to understand multiple perspectives, how to mediate between different viewpoints. Key skill: how to research, how to evaluate what you see and read.

Sites like Stack Overflow for software engineers demonstrate a new moral sense that learning in private is selfish. Public learning is becoming the norm. Instead, most focus will be on childhood education for the poorer sectors of the world. Udacity is a good example of the trajectory. After starting a company to pursue the idea, he pivoted, focusing specifically on skill-oriented education that is coupled directly to the job market.

These need not be MOOCs. Even mobiles can be sources of education. I hope we will see more opportunities arising for sharing this kind of knowledge. New online credential systems will first complement, then gradually replace the old ones. The skills of the future? Those are the skills a robot cannot master yet. Leadership, design, human meta communication, critical thinking, motivating, cooperating, innovating.

In my black-and-white moments I say: Skip all knowledge training in high schools. We make you better than a robot. We let you cooperate with robots. We build your self-trust. We turn you into a decent, polite, social person. And most importantly, we do not mix education with religion — never.

The subject-matter-specific part of a B. A large part of this time is spent not in a classroom but becoming fluent through monitored practice, including group work, internships and other high-intensity, high-interaction apprentice-like programs.

There are possibilities for adding limited skill sets to otherwise qualified workers, e. Jobs that seem viable may fall victim to a surprising development in automation see, for example, filmmaking ; new categories of work may not last long enough to support large numbers of employees.

Automation and semi-automation e. Training is useful but not the end of education — only a kind of education. As for sipping: you need not know the name of every bear to know you should avoid bears. Yet the continual construction of knowledge and cultures requires more from us. So far, training formally as in Kahn Academy and Lynda.

No programmer or developer could keep up without the informal training of Stack Overflow. No need for debate. A little information sip will let us know. But what is left out? Collaborative construction of knowledge in new areas, deeper investigation into known areas, and the discovery of entirely new areas of knowledge.

This is our challenge: how to create wisdom from knowledge, not just jobs from training and information. Today programming is increasingly become a trade. The problem with many websites is not so much the training of the programmers as much as getting managers and C-level people who understand the new concepts of a world being redefined by software.

We need to think about co-evolving work and workers. And, as always, critical thinking will remain the biggest challenge. Rigorous science and humanities courses help students learn how to learn. Skills training all too often does not. Of course, it can complement core academic courses, and is likely to be part of a lifetime of learning for those switching occupations. But turning high school and college into narrow vocational education programs would make their graduates more vulnerable to robotic replacement, not less.

We need to invest in higher education, shoring up support for traditional universities and colleges, lest they eventually become bastions for reproduction of an elite, leaving the rest of society to untested experiments or online programs.

Online learning is a good complement for existing colleges — but cannot replace them. Online-only programs emphasize the upside of high-tech approaches, but rarely grapple with the downside. Big-data surveillance will track the work students do, ostensibly in order to customize learning. This type of training gamification being a good example of adaptive content delivery predicts learner behavior to keep training relevant, interesting, and fresh. Soft skills are going to be the future of workplace training.

Virtual and augmented reality is truly the future of corporate training. Long a training staple in certain industries e.

Augmented reality offers benefits from customer service to healthcare and beyond. Probably not. VR allows employees to test-drive important skills with minimal risk.

Read our full write-up of AR corporate training trends and predictions here. You may be hiring employees fresh out of college who have never had a job before. The competitive job market has sent many millennials and Gen Z students into college in order to compete. However, the resulting college graduates have great technical skills but little understanding of how to apply them. Online mentorship programs , either through your own company or outside of it, can help coach these inexperienced workers to increase their productivity, longevity, and chances of success.

While careful planning of employee training is important, one of the corporate training trends to watch in is the rise of improvisation in instructional design. This uses only materials readily available in a given space to design instruction and can go far beyond just teaching skills or facts. Improvisational design also teaches problem solving and teamwork, two of the all-important soft skills mentioned above.

You have probably heard groans when announcing the next wave of training to employees, but what if you position employee training as part of the benefits package instead of something to be endured? While much of this has to do with the quality and relevance of the training itself, on-the-job training can help employees improve their skills and advance their careers, all on company time and without paying a dime.

Packaging this as the holistic development of your employees as people instead of cogs performing one function over and over is more in line with the expressed values of the younger generations of workers. Microlearning continues to play a huge part in the future of corporate training, providing employees with easily-digested bites of information or instruction that can be immediately applied to a task or project.

Still stuck on how to manage and adapt to the future of corporate training in your company? Reach out to the EdgePoint Learning team.

We can help you learn more about the unique training trends that directly impact your industry or region. Get in touch today to learn how EdgePoint can help with your next project.