The Elearning Media Group recently released its Research Advisory Group Report on the Corporate Segment. It’s a fascinating snapshot, indicating where 268 non-public-sector respondents see things going. It’s worth noting that although most respondents indicated they had a role in tool selection, 51% are trainer/teacher/educators, which is to say they are authoring and delivering training, but likely not sitting in on organizational strategy meetings.

The largest chunk, 22%, were in the healthcare/pharmaceutical industries. I wish the writers of this study would not have lumped those two together, as training challenges are very different. In healthcare, much of the critical training is outsourced to professional schools, and to the organizations which provide continuing medical education. In Pharma, there’s a great deal of internal training on products.

Nevertheless, I find it very interesting that 21% of respondents plan to add social networks to their training mix in the next year. It leaves me wishing I knew more about how these folks perceive the role of the social network in training, and whether they plan to track what happens there. 68% of respondents listed employee engagement as their top business objective for investing in learning.   Improving engagement is likely to be tricky in an environment in which compliance training, not known for its engaging qualities, still leads the list of training priorities!

The study asks the percentage of training hours devoted to

• Social Learning
• Self-paced
• Mobile Learning
• Blended Learning
• Virtual Classroom
• Instructor Led
• E-learning or online

I found this breakdown frustrating, since of course, there are major overlaps. Instructor-led could be in the virtual classroom, though I think most people think of these as separate. (Instructor led was reported to be where the largest chunk of training hours were spent, at 39%) Self-paced is likely online, and may well be consumed via mobile.

What I’m dying to know is what sort of activities comprise that which the respondents call “social learning.” A couple of years ago we were all buzzing about adopting social learning strategies, but we all know that things happen in transition to actual practice. What do these look like as adopted in the organizations who are using them? Are the respondents, like  our customers, creating Internal social networks using microblogs and hosting forum discussions around training topics? Something else entirely?

At Q2, our platform supports all of these modalities, because we understand that whatever the optimal mix is for your organization, you’d rather spend the time developing and delivering top-quality training experiences than chasing down the data on who has successfully completed which activities across several platforms. We’d love to talk to you about how we can help you create, deliver, and report on first quality training for your colleagues. Please, drop us a line at sales@q2learning.com!