Annee Bayeux, chief learning strategist at Degreed, discusses how learning leaders can create a consistent learning experience while embracing the Metaverse and other emerging trends.
A scientist walks across the surface of Mars. A doctor practices their transvenous lead extraction. An engineer investigates a possible fault with an airplane’s landing gear — without ever having the visit a hanger. These events might sound like something possible far into the future, but they are happening right now.
Emerging technologies like the metaverse, mixed reality, virtual reality and augmented reality, and digital twins are transforming the way we work and learn, opening up new possibilities for learning and development leaders to offer hands- on, practical experiences and immersive knowledge sharing. For these innovations to have a tangible impact on the business, however, they can’t be flash-in-the-pan activities but part of a wider learning strategy and tech stack.
Strong foundations make for easy experimentation
It might not sound sexy, but having the right infrastructure in place gives you greater freedom to experiment with new L&D trends and opportunities when they come along. With every month seemingly bringing a new innovation to learning, the faster you get your foundations in place, the more prepared you are for the next ChatGPT or metaverse tool.
Those foundations will be unique to each organization, given your different learning priorities and business goals, but there are common tactics that can be applied across all industries and companies. First and foremost, look at your goals — business and learning. Close alignment with the business will ensure any learning innovation stands a good chance of impacting the top or bottom line. It also justifies your interest and efforts in the new technology. Without this, your experiment risks being seen as a vanity project.
Equipping L&D with the right skills
Your L&D team (and other stakeholders) also need to feel confident to work with a new innovation. If they have the right skills, they can use the technology effectively. Bbut if they lack the knowledge, your initiative will be hindered from the start. Before you bring a new technology to your organization, work out what skills you need to build to enable it and a timeline for achieving that.
Striking at the right time
Time is really the secret ingredient in bringing the metaverse and other technologies to your learning program. You need time to build enabling skills, to get stakeholders excited about what’s coming, and to find those new innovations in the first place. Yet, you also need to move quickly enough when a new opportunity arises to understand if it’s relevant to your learning strategy and to run a pilot program — before the opportunity passes.
Such is the pace of change today that months after a new tool launches, it could advance to include a new version or additional functionality. ChatGPT launched in November 2022, using the GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 large language models. By March 2023, the GPT-4 multimodal model launched with the ability to accept text and image prompts. Your learning strategy and tech stack needs the agility to keep step with new advances.
Open ecosystems give flexibility and futureproofing
Your choice of platform will make a significant difference to your future flexibility. An open ecosystem allows different services and platforms to interact, providing access to new tools and opportunities as they arise, while a closed ecosystem limits interaction and growth to a single vendor solution and their chosen partners.
An open ecosystem offers flexibility, personalization, and the ability to choose compatible tech, while a closed ecosystem provides rigid consistency and centralized support. Because an open system plays more nicely with different services and tools, it is future-proofed for new technologies and changing business needs.
No crystal ball
Future-proofing is crucial, because we cannot accurately predict what’s around the corner. Who would have guessed just a few years ago that 100 million of us would be “chatting” with artificial intelligence, or that we would be purchasing real estate and sponsorship in an entirely virtual space. Futurists imagine a world where we have general AI where the lines between man and machine blur even more, and where we even have direct computer interfaces plugged into our brains. The reality may be even more sci-fi than that.
L&D will be at the front lines of these massive societal and economic evolutions because with every change, comes the need for new skills and targeted learning that builds those skills in time. So, it’s important to have the openness and agility in your culture, strategy and technology in order to be able to shift in response to changes.
Don’t forget today
However, it’s also vital to remember to deliver learning that meets everyday role expectations too. Learning is happening on two planes right now, with skills not only being built to succeed in the workplaces of tomorrow, but also being built to fulfill today’s needs.
The key is offering a range of learning opportunities from self-directed, guided pathways, to collaborative, social-based methods, such as academies and peer-learning groups. Learners need ways to grow their everyday knowledge, via a video or blog post, for example, but also to take part in deep skills-building for areas like leadership, agile development, 5G and cloud computing. And yes, the metaverse and other emerging technologies can play a part here — as long as they are well integrated into the wider learning ecosystem.
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