Demographics are Shifting

If you’re noticing an increase in the number of younger people in the workforce, it’s not just your imagination.   A recent Pew Research Center Article confirms that Millennials are now the nation’s largest living generation.  Millennials are sometimes called Gen Y with ages from 20 -36 and number 75.4 million people, surpassing the lagging Baby Boomers (74.9 million).  By 2020, Millennials will make up 50 percent of the workforce.  What does this mean for you as a learning professional?

Attention Span Research

There has been a tremendous amount of hoopla related to research conducted by Microsoft to measure the attention span of a group of more than 2,000 Canadians.  This research was first conducted in the year 2000 and the average attention span was twelve seconds.  When the research was conducted again in 2015, the average attention span had fallen to eight seconds.  Research shows that the attention span of the average gold fish is nine seconds.  How can this be?  What implications does it have for the modern learner?  What does it mean for today’s learning and development professional?

An Instructional Design Horror Story

You’re a Director of Sales Training.   Your product management team has approached you about three new products being released in the next ten weeks.  You’re on the hook to get training created to support the sales professionals who will pitch these new products to prospects and clients.  Your regular team of training developers is slammed with other projects and you need to outsource some of the training to external training suppliers.  They come well-recommended and are on the company vendor list.  The problem is that after six weeks of working with them the only thing you’ve seen is a detailed design document.  During the seventh week, they finally produce sample training content that is completely off-the-mark.  Why did it take seven weeks to see the first samples?  Because the suppliers used the traditional ADDIE model instead of an agile development process.

In the past, learning professionals were in the business of creating content to “train” people.  Learners experienced a lot more “telling” and “showing,” and often the communication between the instructor and the learners was one way, i.e., instructor to learner.  In today’s world of mega-information and sensory overload, most adult learners can’t be “told” everything they might need to know.  Filtered quality content has much greater value than massive amounts of non-relevant information.  It is more important to be able to access the needed information or content at the right time rather than getting “trained” in the classical sense.  What implications does this have for today’s learning professional?