Hyper drive learning: a move away from push culture

Over the last 20 years, learning and development in organisations have changed tremendously. I have been fortunate to have witnessed these changes from perspective of users, trainers and system implementers. 
I remember in the 1990s, the hot thing was CBT (computer based training) using floppy disks and PCs. During 2000s, it was about e-learning where employees could learn online anytime from the desktop at work or at home. It enabled organisations to train employees at speed and at scale and less reliant on classroom training.
In the last few years, I have seen another major shift with employees requesting for learning anytime, anywhere and on any device. They search for content and even learn from external content providers like Udacity and Edx. 
This has put a strain on learning and development professionals (L&D) to effectively handle these changes. 
This raises many questions: how are we going to capture external learning, do we need to invest in new technology, do we need to change our roles? Is Learning & development department still relevant to the organisation? 
Well, L&D professionals must understand the forces at play: digital disruption. Its fast and its furious. According to Prof Ravi Aron from Casey Business School, John Hopkins University the rise of artificial intelligence and automation, uberisation of resources and predictive analytics are disrupting economies and businesses around the globe. 
For businesses to thrive and survive, he singled out “learning” as the one thing that that will save us all. Learning has to change in order to help employees not only change jobs but change careers. 
Learning must change at the pace of business. I call this type of learning hyper drive or on-demand learning. 
That means moving away from push learning culture like compliance and formal training towards pull learning. Pull learning refers to content that are being created by learners, shared among learners and commented by learners. 
For example, a sales expert publishes an article summarising key success factors and shares it on company’s social platform for other sales to read and post comments. In pull learning, learners are at the center. They drive the direction of content not L&D professionals.
Invest in new technology that gives capability to organisation to track informal and formal learning. Even though learning is outside the walls of your organisation. Look for learning technology that has built in artificial intelligence capability that can automatically recommend learning content to learners and influencers. Video learning is another must have feature.
Adapt and embrace the role of being a “content curators”. L&D professional are now required not only to any create content but to find, market, communicate and promote content that is being produced by employees and external providers (content curator).  This is a strategic move and perhaps the most difficult one. It’s up to L&D professionals to make hyper drive learning work with the right blend of technology, learners and content. 
Learning and development department is needed more than ever only if L&D embraces this new role. Employees will get the right learning at the right time and organisation will benefit from the right capabilities it needs to succeed in this age of digital disruption.

Suvit Chansrichawla, next-generation HR consultant under the brand Serendipity&Co.