3 major trends in L&D 2019

What's hot in L&D? Donald H Taylor tries to answer this question using the annual L&D Global Sentiment Survey. This research has been carried out for 6 years, what gives us opportunity to see trends change over time. This year, it covers 92 countries from around the world and almost 2,000 respondents who were asked to answer a question (or actually choose an answer from a closed list).

What will be hot in workplace L&D in 2019?

Before continuing, look at the illustration below and try to answer this question yourself.

What has the L&D community chosen this year as the hottest? The responses were distributed as follows.

The top three places deal with topics related to data and AI (personalization, artificial intelligence and ... learning analytics). Interestingly, they were so popular this year that they won over 30% of all votes - the same as the 8 least popular topics + Learning Analytics appeared for the first time and immediately jumped on the podium.

What is this year's survey telling us?

1. This is the year of artificial intelligence and data.

AI and Data analytics look to us from every direction. I fear to open the fridge :) We collect more and more data, and although we are often not yet able to analyze it or do not know what to do with it, we feel the potential lurking in it.

However, in L&D these topics are at the very early stage of development.

Recommendations / personalization mechanisms, which should match programs and training materials to our needs (like they do in entertainment - Netflix, Spotify) do not have enough data about us and "intelligence" to present useful results. At the end modern training platforms offers slightly better filtering mechanisms.

Learning Analytics? Imagine that you can easily monitor training needs, check statistics and measure the impact of training on business results. Sounds great! But first you have to clean up your training data, connect with other systems in the company .. and have people with the right skills on board who are rare and valuable on the market

The business departments where data analytics is slowly becoming a daily bread have an impact on the popularization of AI and Learning analytics. However we need two things in order to popularize these technologies in L&D:

1. people who are able to analyze data and on this basis recommend actions or anticipate the upcoming changes
2. greater cooperation with business, including combining HR data with employees and company performance.

2. Mobile learning, Micro learning and VR/AR have stabilized in the market and have a chance to stay with us for longer, bringing real business value.

Just look around and you will see that these technologies have entered the main stream. They are cheap, available and supported by suppliers. There are still many skeptics when it comes to virtual and augmented reality, but such examples as Walmart show that these technologies are working and are ready to support our development activities.

Even in smaller markets there are more and more implementations. A vendor coming to a meeting with a mobile application or VR headset does not make such an impression as a year ago.

3. Deeper cooperation with business, showing the value of L&D activities, content curation, development of L&D functions in the organization have suffered a spectacular decline.

It's hard to explain because these should be the priorities of our activities. I suspect that ubiquitous Digital Transformation means that we are currently focusing more on technologies instead of our core activities.

You can view the full report here and if you want to see a recording with the author of the study, where he explains and interpret the results, I invite you here.