Years of academy training wasted how to#

And these platforms were supposed to be intelligent, easy to use, and fast and interactive to learn. Companies started to buy Learning Experience Platforms, products designed to be the “Netflix of Learning.” The idea was to make discovery easy: find what you want, consume it, and move on. So we moved into a new paradigm, the one I call “ Learning in the Flow of Work.” We recognized that both micro-learning and macro-learning go together, and we started to think about learning at the point of need. People at work were too busy, too distracted, and too focused in their development needs. Then we tried MOOCS, which replicated the university experience online. It sort of worked but people didn’t really want to watch an hour long videos.

First we thought video-based learning was nirvana. We then entered another decade of experimentation. GE almost shut down Crotonville, and everyone went crazy for “digital learning.” They started to revolt against corporate L&D. Courses were too hard to find, the e-learning was boring, and they were finding content on consumer websites they liked better. Companies had invested in billions in learning management systems and employees were nor even using them. In 2015 we did a study of the net-promoter score of L&D and it was negative. So corporate consumers of e-learning content got fed up. They discovered that even with the world’s most exclusive online content, nobody would ever watch more than two minutes of a video.

My partners in the Josh Bersin Academy, Nomadic Learning, were the founders of a company called 50 Lessons, which built world-class videos of CEOs talking about their business problems.

And as digital media expanded, we lost our patience and decided the content had to be fast and immediate. No longer did people want carefully authored page-turning content, they wanted “in-your-face” video that jumped off the screen (or phone). When YouTube,, and MOOCs first started ten years or so ago, they disrupted the e-learning market.

Years of academy training wasted how to#

For the next decade, we tried to figure out how to blend online training with face-to-face, and we kind of lost our way. So we coined the phrase “blended learning” (I wrote a whole book on it) and we decided to mix it up. E-learning was boring, tedious, and hard to complete – and it missed practice, hands-on experience, and coaching. While this was exciting and lowered the cost of training (and gave birth to an industry of online learning companies), it didn’t quite work as planned. In the early 2000s we coined the phrase “e-learning” and companies started shutting these things down to create the “virtual university.” There was also a recession, so it made sense to stop “wasting money on facilities” and put it online. Then along came the internet, and we decided all that had to go. During my time at IBM in the 1980s, I flew to education centers all over the country, sitting in front of deep experts to learn about sales, customer service, software, and computer engineering. Charles), hired faculty and college professors, and sent their employees to courses. Twenty years ago companies built physical universities ( GE’s Crotonville, Accenture St. Corporate training and development has been through quite a journey.