Friday, April 18, 2008

Tech play at HRD

A small observation.

Went down to the CIPD's HRD show at ExCel centre this week. Was its usual eclective self - manor house training venues, lots of leadership and soft skill trainers, and the occassional bloke sprayed blue walking around promoting something.

But something did strike me this year as being different - the reemergence of technology at HRD. Learning Technology and e-learning has never been a significant part of this show. Whilst CIPD flirted a little with it in the early e-learning years, it soon got dropped as a significant focus and the number of vendors dwindled. This year it seemed to have a quite strong presence, distributed around the exhibition hall.

Although many of the big vendors were still not there, there were a number of the serious emergent LMS companies including Cornerstone from the US, NetDimensions from UK/HongKong, E2Train from the UK and IMC from Germany. StepStone was there from the Talent Management arena accompanied by a raft of online 360 providers and similar. And there were lots of e-learning vendors; CrossKnowledge from France, Epic, Line Communications, Intellego, Information Transfer, and so on.

Not sure if this is a trend, but certainly I was encouraged that despite seemingly the best efforts of CIPD and many traditional training people to underplay the trend, e-learning and learning technology is clearly now part of the mainstream of learning and development.

Back in play

Apologies for the lack of blogging activity over the past few months. Life has been very busy and our focus on the blog has dropped off completely.

However, light is at the end of the tunnel and I hope to ensure this blog gets more activity going forward. There's a lot been happening. We've been working on some really interesting research which will start to be made available in the next month or so, and we also have more people and infrastructure to push the learning research forward.

Watch this space!

Regards, DAVID