I was struck by this extensive summary of market data about the growth of learning technologies. Pretty much every indicator is showing significant growth across education and corporate learning segments. Close to two years in on our COVID experience, this is not much of a surprise, I suppose. It has taken the forced closure of classrooms to bring many organisations to seriously apply digital tools for supporting learning.
What did strike me though are the indicators of confidence in the effective application of learning technology. Admittedly, the author runs a business resting on the sale of learning tech and has a clearly boosterish point of view, nevertheless, these are boom times for the industry.
These are some of the data points that struck me:
- “employees only have an average of 24 minutes per week to spend on learning” – there is a particular definition of learning at play here, but technology plays into this constraint
- “51% of businesses conduct eLearning courses because they believe it will improve employee morale.” – how does that sit gainst the above point?
- “According to a study by the Research Institute of America, eLearning increases knowledge retention rates by 25% to 60%” – needs further enquiry…against what?
- “According to a study by Deloitte, 2,500 companies found that companies with “comprehensive training programs” have 218% higher revenue per employee and 24% higher profit margins.” Blimey. Much to conjure with here.
- “corporations could save up to 50-70% of training costs by switching to online training” – even of that stat is optimistic, it will be the foundation of corporate elearning for the coming years
- And yet…“nearly 41.7% of Fortune 500 companies using technology to train their employees” – that number feels very low and definitions need scrutiny.
