Today, when you sit down to watch a television show, you likely log onto your favorite streaming service and comb through various categories and recommendations until you settle on an option. Perhaps you’ve watched previous episodes and are picking up where you left off—or perhaps you want to venture into an all-new show. You might be watching on a television screen, but if you’re on-the-go, you’re probably using a tablet or smartphone instead. No matter which specific show you choose, you are in the driver seat—able to choose and pause and continue content whenever desired, from wherever desired.
This evolving consumer behavior isn’t limited to entertainment—it has changed across other industries, including learning. As today’s media consumers adopt new manners of media consumption and adapt to significant changes introduced by COVID, IT learning must also shift its approach to meet the needs of individuals, wherever they may be in their learning journey.
A Changing Classroom
Throughout the past several years, we have seen broad trends in the IT learning landscape including emphasis on subscription models, digital delivery platforms, social learning, guided virtual live sessions and more immediate access to experts and more modular training content. My time as a member of the
Technology and Services Industry Association (TSIA) board has allowed me to see the progress of these trends across the industry. The current global pandemic, however, has accelerated and highlighted the pertinency of these trends. As a result of COVID, the traditional physical classroom experience has metamorphosed, and it is unlikely to return to the exactly the same experience we once came to expect.
Whereas you may have previously traveled to participate in a multi-day training event, today’s IT learning allows for a more flexible and focused experience that fits better to your everyday work and private life—especially amid the changes of COVID, like working remotely.
Modularization of study—breaking up training into smaller pieces for the individual learner—is increasingly incorporated within the overarching learning industry as we see that day-long training sessions are not always the most effective learning format for everyone. Just like selecting and streaming a television show, today’s learner can choose the relevant training they want and complete it at a time and speed that works for them. By blending physical and/or virtual instructor-led training, interspersed with self-study, companies are able to achieve learning objectives within a target timeframe while also accommodating individual learning preferences and current realities like the challenges of COVID.
Because SAP has been transforming its learning offerings over the past five years, our existing digital and cloud based platform offerings have allowed for faster adjustment to the changes in learning conditions and digital media consumption brought on by the pandemic. Yet, the sudden impact has been like a stress test and has provided us with new insights for where innovation adds value and we continuously rethinking how we can help our learners learn best.
While I feel that we will not return to the same level of traditional classroom experience, the human element of learning remains absolutely critical. Live, online interactive classroom instruction as well as expert-led, collaborative peer-to-peer learning and intuitive learning simulations are just some of the ways the
enhanced SAP Training and Adoption portfolio has been flexibly designed to optimize each learner’s experience.
Looking Forward
For the immediate and post-COVID future, we predict that the need for knowledge and skills will persist, increasingly in virtual and digital formats. The speed of innovation is only increasing, and IT learning must be quickly and effectively delivered so that learners can consume it in a way that truly creates value.
As a report by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Josh Bersin in the
Harvard Business Review pointed out: “The single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization’s learning culture.” Technology is disrupting every industry and area of life, and work is no exception. One of the main career implications of the digital revolution is a shift in demand for human expertise. For instance, LinkedIn’s talent
research shows that half of today’s most in-demand skills weren’t even on the list three years ago.
Continuous learning remains a core focus and value of our offerings, which is why the SAP Training and Adoption portfolio provides regular updates to include the latest relevant training content.
This new way of learning is possible, and—as
McKinsey & Company notes—the need to invest in learning “has never been more insistent.” The global pandemic has brought renewed focus to the pre-existing need for reskilling, while also allowing for the rethinking of specific ways in which different learners best absorb and apply new skills and information.
As individuals’ preferred way of learning and consuming media evolves—and as challenges like the pandemic further reshape the way we learn—SAP will evolve and elevate our portfolio to help customers achieve success and business impact, including improvement in key performance measures and increase in satisfaction. Through a variety of choices for instruction environments; in-product guidance; contextual help in a multitude of languages; full visibility into the usage of SAP solutions; and more, the SAP Training and Adoption portfolio’s focus on the learner experience will support individuals’ learning journeys tomorrow and beyond.
