Credit Crunch: Disaster or Opportunity?

The following is a report from the latest of LINE’s Forum Dinners. These events bring professionals in Learning and Organisational Development together for knowledge sharing and debate. The question posed to the delegates at this event was:
Are organisations and e-learning vendors seeing problems or opportunities in this recession?

The discussion began by looking back at technological changes in the business landscape since the last major financial downturn and went on to examine how these might provide short-term opportunities and, ultimately, help point the way towards recovery this time around.

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity” Albert Einstein

Internet Usage

The last recession happened back in 1999 when the world was a very different place. Since that time we have seen a worldwide explosion of activity in internet access and usage, astounding growth in broadband coverage and more particularly in mobile usage. Two thirds of people in the developing world now have access to the internet and nearly 100% to mobile phones.

The very first domestic broadband service in the UK became available in 1999. The following major web-based services first launched on the following dates:

In market terms the rise of informal e-learning on the back of these and other services has been huge. Who doesn’t use Google, Wikipedia and lots of other web services to research things and learn? On top of this there have been the social networking services that have amplified our ability to communicate, share and learn. The market has had several successful e-learning IPOs, including those of Grand Canyon, Bridgeport and Rosetta Stone, and smaller e-learning companies are experiencing growth despite the tough economic context.

Social Networking and learning

An interesting example of social learning had taken place within the group that met for this LINE Forum event. I had ‘tweeted’ a fact about the first domestic broadband service being launched in 1999 and it had been picked up by one of the delegates prior to our meeting. This shows that social networking allows you to share and pick up learning from people you respect and know, even though you may never have met them face to face. Many ‘tweets’ and blog posts link to useful resources and the learning tends to be presented in a useful, real time flow rather than through fixed, timetabled courses.

Size matters

It was agreed that one of the most significant effects of the web had been the change in the size (that is to say, duration) of learning experiences and content. Courses have become shorter as they’ve been freed from the timetabled ‘week, day, hour’ model. YouTube has led to shorter pieces of video content which are only as long as they need to be to make their point. The most extreme example of this is perhaps Twitter, with its 140 character limit; forcing people to be sharp and concise with their posts. This has been an altogether good thing in learning, where less is almost always more.

Trojan horses

Reduced budgets, and a focus on efficiency improvements, provide an opportunity for technology to alleviate the ‘pain points’ caused by necessary training that cannot just be turned off at will. E-learning can usually do it cheaper, and can often do it better. These interventions can in turn become ‘Trojan Horses’, providing a proof-of-concept for using more innovative methods of learning and communications within the organisation.

We felt that the following key interventions would be particularly useful in this regard.

Induction

Interestingly, companies have not stopped recruiting despite the recession; seeing it as an opportunity to ‘feed and weed’. Induction (or even ‘pre-induction’) training, using simple electronic techniques, affords an opportunity to excite new students or employees and can set the tone for their experience of learning in the organisation as a whole before they even start work or undertake a course.

Compliance

This is especially relevant as many organisations have more compliance needs than before and senior management see it as being vital to the survival of their organisations. With increased focus on this area, an opportunity exists to get rid of the dull, tick-box style of training often used for compliance, in favour of more sophisticated forms of learning and communications that actually make a difference.

Leadership training

Here there is an opportunity to seed new learning techniques into the minds of leaders. Involving them in content creation to pass on their leadership knowledge with the use of simple tools, is a highly positive way of getting them on board with the new techniques – via a little bit of flattery!

Business skills

In charting ways out of recession, harnessing the energy of the rising generation is crucial. We broached the thorny generational question.

Do younger employees have an abundance of electronic communication skills but low face-to-face skills? Or could this view reflect the prejudice of older observers who are just reinforcing an old-fashioned view that face-to-face interaction is all-important and that live meetings are where all the action should be. Younger people are used to electronic communication and collaboration and have less need to gather in rooms with agendas, chairs, and action points that often never get completed. They are happier to use Skype, chat, email, Facebook, etc. to get things done. In fact, there are signs that young people prefer lower bandwidth media for communications as it cuts out a lot of unnecessary ‘noise’.

A more serious challenge is the possibility that they may lack deeper, analytic skills; that they could fall short when it comes to fuller analysis and strategic thinking and planning, due to the more fragmented nature of their approach. On the whole, however, it was thought by delegates that young people have more skills and are better equipped than most people give them credit for.

Entrepreneurship

It may be that the recession pushes people into being more enterprising. Trauma is often an agent for change and some may see this as an opportunity to do different things with their lives, or at least be more innovative and enterprising within their organisations.

Marketing

Along with the shortening of courses and learning experiences mentioned earlier, we are also seeing the increasing need to market the learning itself, and even to avoid calling it learning. Marketing skills were seen as being very similar to learning design skills: they both have cognitive change as their goal and both need to adopt strategies where less is more. This was seen as a key area of focus.

Conclusion

A wide range of topics were discussed in our brief survey. I think it would fair to say that we all felt there are genuine opportunities, caused by recessionary forces, to accelerate the adoption of e-learning and learning innovation. Recession creates a climate in which people are more willing to do things differently – often through sheer necessity. And though new ways of doing things may be adopted principally because they hold the promise of doing an existing activity more efficiently (or cheaper), once in the organisation they act as a Trojan Horse – showing possibilities for doing things not only more easily but better, and also for doing different things altogether.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the event, and ensured that as well as solving all the problems of the world, we also had a rollicking good time! Keep in touch.

Donald Clark

LINE Communications.