There will be changes in the Learning and Development industry in the future.

There will be drastic changes; some of them are highlighted in this article.

Employees sharing knowledge among themselves:

First of all, there will be the emergence of skilled workers who will share knowledge among themselves. So, instead of Learning and Development professionals creating a course, they will only facilitate the workforce sharing knowledge. This means that such professionals will have to upgrade their skills from being content creators to content facilitators. There will be networks for Personal Knowledge Management created for employees where they will be empowering each other with knowledge.

Creating asynchronous learning the same as classroom training: 

There will be events outside the classroom also. Classroom training will be replicated in the form of asynchronous learning. There will be also a replication of classroom interactions among the learners in the form of online form debates and virtual meetings. The learners have become evolved with the advent of technology. This means, that they look for information on the internet through MOOC’s, they are not satiated any more, with any knowledge shared with them in classrooms. The Learning and Development professionals will be thrust with the responsibility of creating experiences that can be seen on different devices, through social media and MOOC’s and provide on the job training through real-world experiences making use of 3D technologies like Virtual Reality. There will be an emergence of wearables to make sure that the learners take advantage of virtual reality. Wearables come in the form of smart electronic devices that are worn on the body so that there can be an exchange of information. They are like activity trackers such as smartwatches with sensors that provide data through the use of the internet. These objects are based on the technology of the Internet of Things.

New kinds of jobs will evolve:

Initially, there was an invention of connectivity throughout the world. Then automation happened in which simple jobs started getting handled by machines. Now, there are jobs which are located over the world. Soon, we are going to enter an age in which robots are going to work with us. Robots are increasingly getting used in the manufacturing industry. 

Hence, the nature of the training imparted by Learning and Development professionals will change. This implies that such professionals will have a different set of responsibilities. Its because jobs will exist now will vanish and there will be a new set of jobs. The task of L&D professionals will be to make the workforce ready for jobs that are not even in existence yet but will arrive in future.

But if the Learning and Development guys can’t keep up to their jobs, there will be a highly useless workforce in the future that does not have the requisite skill sets. Organizations will pay adversely for such a useless workforce because their jobs won’t be done efficiently.

Different kinds of skills required in one place to solve problems: 

There will be multiple skills required in future jobs. So the workforce will have to be trained for them. There will be problems in jobs not able to be handled by even highly skilled individuals. Hence, individuals from different teams will have to work on multiple projects simultaneously. These teams will collaborate on a project once it gets started and then move on once it’s done. So, the team will have flexible working models. However, the collaborating teams will be provided with proper technological equipment to carry out the project tasks. The task before the L&D team will be to make sure that such collaborating teams can work with each other. They should be able to work through social networks meant for large enterprises.