Real Insights ... from the horse's mouth!?

Tomorrow sees us hold our annual Symposium in London. We’re delighted to be joined by so many members of our Corporate Research Network, including organisations such as Aviva, BT, Lloyds Banking Group, Shell and Vodafone.

Hosting roundtable style events is something we’ve been doing for over 10 years now, as they’re a fantastic format for stimulating insight and debate. The Elearnity team is lucky enough to get to a lot of industry events, and it’s always interesting to hear thought leaders tell us what the next big trend is. But nothing really beats listening to those who are walking the walk and implementing learning and talent solutions in the real world. Understanding the challenges they face everyday gives us a unique edge in our research and advisory services. Most importantly though, by sharing it in a trusted environment with their peers, other organisations can learn from what’s working – and what’s not.

Ahead of this year’s event, we ran a survey which found that integrating talent, performance, and development workflows is now becoming more of a reality in major organisations. For many respondents, there is a clear focus on the delivery of global solutions through the use of one common platform. Whilst one common platform was had often been deployed, many attendees highlighted the need to embed its use and the importance of simplifying the experience for end users, often by integrating processes.   Although the learning and talent infrastructure does play a central role many respondents were also looking to the future and delivering solutions to multiple devices was seen as a critical focus area for many during the next 12 months as was moving towards more resources than online courses.  The familiar challenges of engaging stakeholders to use online technology, as well as broadening the scope of solutions, were also still viewed as important.

One of the most significant changes over the last year was the increasing corporate acceptance in the role technology can play in supporting learning and talent solutions and a continued willingness to invest despite the need in many organisation to restrain spending.

It’s encouraging to see corporate organisations continuing to significantly investing in learning and talent solutions.  Even though innovations such as mobile access will play a significant role in the future for many organisations, maximizing the value from existing solutions is clearly still an important area of focus.  For many organisations 2013 is a year of transition with learning and talent professionals being given the opportunity to reinvent online learning and talent solutions and demonstrate the value they can add to their business by integrating processes to create an improved user experience.

Themes to be covered in the corporate roundtables this year include:

• Using technology to support workplace learning and performance support
• The metrics that matter when measuring learning and talent
• The realities of corporate mobile learning
• Blended learning in corporate organisations in 2013
• The future of learning and talent systems
• Corporate learning and talent innovations that make a difference

So watch out for a follow-up blog series detailing the findings within each of these subject areas and useful mind maps from each session. 

As well as discussions amongst members of our Corporate Research Network, the Symposium also provides a unique approach for corporate delegates to interact and get insights from the supply-side via a rapid fire series of joint corporate/vendor roundtable sessions. Vendor participants this year are:

Assima, Cornerstone OnDemand, Epic, Kallidus, Kenexa, NetDimensions, Saba, SumTotal Systems and Unicorn Training.

Our aim is to give everyone has the opportunity to discuss their own unique challenges, putting trends and technology adoption into the context of their organisation. It’s always fascinating to see what emerges from the roundtables and gain a clearer perspective of the reality of learning and talent solutions in major organisations. The one thing we can always guarantee is it won’t be boring!

Watch out for live Twitter coverage tomorrow from Kate Graham, David Wilson and the rest of the Elearnity team; check back here for a full summary of the day and the start of our dedicated follow-up series. Click here for more details on our Corporate Research Network and Vendor Programmes, and for information of future Corporate Roundtables.