Return to ASTD

Posted on 08 June 2011 by James McLuckie and tagged as conference, astd

This week we hand our blog over to Owen Ferguson, Product Development Director at GoodPractice. Owen recently attended the ASTD's International Conference and Exhibition (ICE) in Florida. He shares his thoughts about the experience with us below.

Last year, a couple of us from Eden Tree and GoodPractice attended the ASTD's (ICE) in Chicago (you can read our CEO Peter Casebow's thoughts about that conference over at the GoodPractice blog). We got so much value from the trip that we decided to go to again this year as part of an international delegation from the UK.

The sheer scale of the conference is impressive, even the second time around. At this year's event there were 8,500 learning and development professionals in attendance. Your experience of any conference is going to depend on the speakers you choose to see. There are so many sessions running concurrently at ASTD ICE that several people could go to the conference and come out with a completely different impression. In fact, that's what happened with the UK delegation, led by the great team at Reed Learning, who are the ASTD's international partner in the UK.

It would be impossible to cover everything I learned at the conference in a single blog post. Instead, I'll highlight what I saw as the key themes that emerged from the conference.

Social learning (or collaborative learning) was a hot topic again this year

Last year there was a lot of talk and quite a few sessions focusing on 'social learning', or 'collaborative learning', as some of the speakers preferred to label it. At the time, it felt like this was a bit of a preaching-to-the-choir exercise, since most people attending those sessions already seemed to be on board with using social media in their learning interventions.

This year was different. Many of the people attending 'social learning' sessions wanted to know things like: how do we get started; what pitfalls can we avoid; how do we get buy-in from senior management; how do we measure the business impact of these initiatives. This was heartening to see, but a sobering reminder that we're still in the very early days of making the best use of social media tools for learning.

Many more people had iPads, tablets and smartphones

Now, admittedly, I followed a more technology-focused schedule than some that were available, but I did so last year as well. There were noticeably more tablets and smartphones on display in the audience, with the iPad being a clear favourite. In fact, I'd even say there were more iPads than laptops.

What did this mean? Well, I took two things from this trend. First, it meant that there was much more interaction on Twitter this year about the conference. The #ASTD2011 hashtag was kept interesting and informative by a number of people. Second, I think that the number of iPads and smartphones on display had an indirect influence on the next theme that emerged which was that ...

Mobile learning (or mLearning) was the new hot topic

If there was a single breakthrough topic this year, it was mobile learning. The sensible reasons given were things like the increasing need to respond quickly, the problem with information overload, an increasingly distributed workforce, the sheer rate of organisational change, and hardware improvement.

I suspect that it's really the explosion in the popularity of iOS and Android devices that's brought mobile to the front of the US L&D audience's mindshare.

E-learning was desperate to shed its 'converted slides' image

I attended a quite a few more sessions about e-learning and creating engaging e-learning this year. I've recently become more convinced that elearning can make a positive contribution to an organisation's learning strategy, but too much of what I've seen in the past has been boring, poorly designed and lacking interaction. The quote that summed up the message coming from the conference came from Michael Allen of Allen Interactions, who said that "narrated slides with a quiz at the end isn't elearning".

The examples from the sessions I attended included more simulations and elements of game mechanics embedded into the learning experience. These helped answer the key objection I have to most elearning which is: why would I complete this elearning module rather than simply read a summary or save a link to the relevant information?

The impending baby boomer retirement wave and influx of 'millennials' is a concern

A number of the sessions I attended this year were about the transfer of tacit knowledge. Again, this continued a a theme I picked up at last year's conference, but there was more of a sense of urgency this time around.

The key driver for this is the impending retirement of the Baby Boomer generation (born 1946-64), and the influx of people into the workforce from Generation Y, or the 'millennials' (born 1980-ish to 2000). Here are a few nuggets to get you thinking about what that demographic change means:

• In 2005, baby boomers were 45% of the workforce and held about 70% of management jobs.
• About 25% of Fortune 500 senior executives are eligible to retire.

The question being asked at the conference was: how do we ensure the tacit knowledge and skills that have been gathered over the career of a baby boomer aren't lost? Especially since, as William Rothwell put it, "asking people to put into words during a discussion what they have learned over a career is ridiculous".

The answers put forth are a topic for another blog post, but the question of whether there's an impending problem should be asked by all HR departments.

The added value

The conference sessions are just part of the reason for attending ASTD ICE, however. The opportunity to share experiences, viewpoints and practices with other learning professionals from all over the world is invaluable. For me, hearing what people are working on, what they're worrying about and what keeps them working late at night helps us to understand the context that our products used in, and how we can help improve them even further.

Next year's ASTD International conference and Exhibition is in Denver. Hope to see you there!

For those who want to find out more about the conference and individual sessions, David Kelly has pulled together a great collection of resources from the conference. If you're interested in finding out more, and want to have an informal chat about it, you can contact me at at oferguson@goodpractice.com.

* I've yet to check the veracity of these figures, but the speakers were credible.

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