A life of jobsA job for life is a relic of a bygone era; professionals now must learn and prepare for a life of jobs. According to Guy Berger, the LinkedIn economist who has analyzed the career paths of more than 3 million graduates, "A college degree used to slot you into a 40-year career. Now it's just an entry-level point to your first job."
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics has cited that the average adult worker held 11 jobs between ages 18-42 (with two-thirds of those jobs held prior to age 28.) Professionals don't have the luxury of putting careers and day-to-day work (and life) responsibilities on hold while they develop the skillsets needed to transition from one job to the next. Instead, professionals in Industry 4.0 recognize the need to upskill continually.
Three similar--yet distinct--frameworks of on-demand professional learning are being used regularly by modern professional learners: just-in-time learning, microlearning, and personalization. None of these models requires time outside the workday and away from the office, certified trainers, or expensive materials and learning platforms. In fact, these three frameworks find their utility in being portable, personal, informal, and inexpensive.
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You're a relatively new manager who will be interviewing finalists for an open position on your team. You've never facilitated a hiring interview before--and while the process and format of this type of interview might be new to you, it's not a process unique to your company. HR is offering a training on a similar topic next month, but you'll be interviewing finalists tomorrow. You need specific knowledge today so that you can be effective tomorrow.
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Just-in-time learning provides the right content at the right time so that learners can access and apply the new knowledge quickly to improve performance and outcomes. The content frequently is found through an internet search and might come in the form of a YouTube video, an online instructional manual, a blog post, or an infographic. Forrester, a global research and advisory firm, notes that this type of learning can be more impactful than classroom instruction because it requires self-reliance and persistence to find time-sensitive answers.
MicrolearningYou have been working in higher education for more than a decade and find yourself involved in an increasing number of cross-departmental projects. The Registrar's Office is leading one of these projects and needs all professional staff to be Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) compliant. You utilize SkillSoft to engage with three short online modules about FERPA before completing a quiz that demonstrates your knowledge of FERPA compliance.
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Long training sessions and thick instructional manuals have been common means to impart massive amounts of information; however, employees' inability to digest this much content in a relatively short amount of time led many companies to rethink their onboarding and training methods. Enter microlearning. Engaging short spurts of learning that are dependent on neither time nor location empower employees to learn when and where they choose. Microlearning modules, often in the form of short videos, increasingly are housed in libraries on a company's LMS or through an outside platform like Lynda.com. The popularity and effectiveness of microlearning has given rise to micro-credentials and digital badges, which provide recognition for new professional skills.
PersonalizationYou met with your supervisor to discuss your short-term and long-term professional goals, including the desire to be considered for project manager roles. Your supervisor was supportive of this goal and helped you create a personalized professional learning plan that would help you develop key skills needed to lead projects effectively. The personalized plan includes online modules about project management in the company's LMS and a weekly job shadowing/apprenticeship with one of the most skilled project managers in the company.
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Modern professional learners find significant value in personalized learning experiences. Elliott Massie, an educational technology expert, noted that employees want the opportunity to select learning options from a larger menu. "They want to know whether other employees have deemed each offering time well spent. And they want to get right to 'the good stuff' while skipping the 'fluff.'" Nevertheless, a 2017 report from Bersin by Deloitte found that only 3 percent of companies are effective at personalized professional learning. The companies that are succeeding with this framework have learned that personalization is about more than the actual content--it's about understanding what learners want, encouraging inquisitiveness, providing choice, and ensuring opportunities exist for employees to utilize their new skills.