Digital Innovation in Learning

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that our digital world is spinning faster and faster. For me working in the education industry this might be closer to heart than for most, when everything I do is trying to find solutions for helping our clients with their struggles.

When I started working in education way back in 2004 it was still pretty simple. Microsoft (Oracle, IBM etc.) released a new version of an old technology that everyone needed to update sooner or later and there we were with a fast solution to help integrating new skills. And if we didn’t help, one of our colleagues in the training industry would because we pretty much offered the same courses. The years went by and not much changed until some years ago when everyone started talking about disruption, new thinking and the software industry began sprinting instead of enduring the endless marathon to the supposed finish line.

Digital innovation is here to stay

With this Covid19 situation, all industries were struck by fast moving newcomers and all of a sudden (almost) everyone realized the need for change rather than pressing harder in the same tracks that had been successful before. The time to start was yesterday, adopt or die was suddenly not just an expression as we clearly can see when international giants all of a sudden starts reducing to zero market share. For us in the learning industry, we had to decide quickly, would we settle with being one of the best in what we do or look at new ways of delivering training!? We chose the latter and then the really hard work began. Change isn’t easy, change isn’t for everyone but change is however necessary to always be the preferred choice and that is where we were heading!!

I and many with me would say that the mental part is the number one place you have to start and also an agile way of working and a transparent chain of command or rather self-governing teams and continuous improvement. When our journey start with a real mission, a true set of values (in actual use every day) and a company united in these ideas we start to see real results! Instead of trying to deliver what we assume is an industry standard, we have to start evolving with our customers and deliver training in a format they request. We should look close on our core values and realize that we always have been a training supplier for the entire software industry. These days however IT is everywhere and there are so many roles that require so many different new skills that we have to see the bigger picture and team up with other great companies that help us deliver an even more fulfilling menu of courses. I am fully aware that this merely the start in our journey on continuous improvement and I’ve come to embrace this fact.

Fail quick and move on

I’ll give you a personal example from the journey I told you about in the first question. As a training supplier I had to keep track of some 800 unique courses and even if most of them involve a computer, some of them are more theoretical and delivered in training rooms without computers. I came up with the "great idea" that we should include a tablet (iPad) in the course cost for all soft skill trainings, both as a way of giving everyone access to an online learning platform, but of course as a differentia towards our competitors. This had never been done in Sweden and my idea gained a lot of great PR and new clients, but the calculation on actual cost was off and when my hardware dealer raised the prize of the tablet, the whole thing became quite cost fully. This combined with the fact that I had missed anchoring the concept with our sales representatives and few of our teachers actually understood what extra the tablet brought to the course led to a quick decision late December that I stopped the whole thing and called it an “autumn campaign”. Today the concept of bring your own device is as good but with a way lower cost.

Another incremental innovation in my industry sector (competence development) could be just to listen to our clients who are saying that time constraints is the number one reason for not taking a class room training. Ways of helping customers to new skills via remote training, blended learning and other tools is an innovation that makes the journey softer, but it doesn’t solve everything.

The number one priority right now is to lead the way of finding true learning transfer. By this I mean a way of actually making sure that the new skills sticks and come to use as much as possible. Succeeding with learning transfer mean we have to educate both our staff, our teachers as well as our clients who are used to deliver and receive training in a fashion that has been standardized for many years. 

An impossible innovation? 

This is without a doubt the hardest question to answer as I live to find answers to “impossible innovations”. I would say that getting 100% of all teachers onboard with new ways of delivering training is impossible. As the majority of them are leading experts in their own area and also has 20-30 years of teaching under their belt it takes time to learn new methods. If you stumble upon the person that “know how everything is supposed to be", frankly the only answer I see is replacing them with a bit more open minded people and I refuse to see this as my only option!