Meet Rosie, Amy, Luna and Confused Colin... the next generation of L&D professionals?

“What should future L&D professionals be working towards?”  

This was the question I recently asked at the event I hosted for the CIPD entitled, ‘It wasn’t raining when I left – The Future of L&D.’  With much talk in the industry focusing on ‘how we learn,’ rather than ‘what we learn’, we explored...

 how this might affect the next generation of learning enablers, and as a result what this also meant for us, their potential mentors. 
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The photo above shows the results of a somewhat ‘informal’ activity, which highlighted that we should be rethinking the old school Train-the-Trainer workshops, which tend to focus on design and delivery skills, and start to introduce a more diverse range of topics such as; Gamification, Neuroscience, critical thinking and being digitally savvy, to name but a few!  

As one member of the audience quite rightly pointed out, most people are already searching the internet for answers, so if we want to be part of the future of L&D we need to embrace this change and prepare our successors for a different way of learning. 

The caveat here of course is that for us to pass on this knowledge, we first need to understand it and use it in a live environment ourselves.  So, while I don't expect these topics to suddenly become mainstream overnight, I would expect to see them being discussed and highlighted with potential Trainers, or how else are we going to move things forward! 
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