Belated predictions

Last week in London, I noticed that Human Capital Management had picked up a story I’d written for Learning Light.

Letter from Silicon Valley, January 2007
by Jay Cross, Internet Time Group
2007: Man plans; God laughs. 

Every year at this time, we Americans take a break from thinking only a quarter-year ahead to consider what the next twelve months may bring. I’m going to give you the bullet points of my personal predictions that may impact eLearning in 2007 below. Members of Learning Light can dig deeper into my rationale in the Learning Light Knowledge Base.

1. Work and learning will continue to converge. Nurturing learning ecosystems will supplant course-by-course instructional design.

2. Talent management, wikis, and intangible assets will cross the chasm into the mainstream. M-learning will not.

3. Workforce learning will become increasingly self service, accessible as needed or requested.

4. Web architecture will cut into the Learning Management System market. The web’s flexibility, lower total cost of ownership, and ease of use will reinforce this migration to the web.

5. Learning management, delivery, and reporting will be available on a buy-only-what-you-need hosted basis. Just as Salesforce.com enables small companies to use the same applications that large companies do, one or more vendors will offer an equivalent learning delivery system online.

6. The outcry over sub-par, irrelevant training will lead to wide-spread adoption of quality ratings supplied by all learners.

7. Workers will develop an increasing amount of their learning content, just as the “read/write web” relies on users to provide solutions to problems.

8. The panic over losing the knowledge in the heads of departing baby boomers will subside.

9. In company news, Microsoft Vista will land with a thud. Many companies will adopt a wait-and-see attitude after massive security breeches come to light.

10. Microsoft will buy Yahoo! to try to make up for ground lost to Google. Wal*Mart, hungry to grow despite market saturation, will buy Amazon.com.

As comedian Dennis Miller says, “This is just my opinion; I may be wrong”