The Nexus of Social and Mobile

Ask any training professional and they will tell you that the two most talked about technology trends within the training space are Social and Mobile. Now ask most training professionals what they are doing in these specific areas and the answer most likely will be, not much; which is a fair answer given how new this is to the training world.

With mobile devices, it’s clear what the answer should be … learner on the move, training anywhere and anytime, sales training for the field representative and countless other opportunities that exist within that space.

With social, you have all the blog posts, the discussion forums, the sharing to Facebook, Twitter etc., the wiki angle and the connection building, which you see in all social platforms.

What really excites me is the intersection of mobile and social learning. As mobile devices continue to grow, we can all recognize the sway from standard desktop usage towards increasing mobile device adoption. You get tagged in a picture on Facebook? You’ll get a notification so that you know to go there. You need to answer a question? Look up the wiki app on your phone. Want to share a video that you saw? Share it instantaneously with anyone in your contacts or you email address book.

Here are some real world examples of what this looks like in the training world:

• Get assigned Required Training and a message will show up in your iPhone notification bar that you have one training item to complete.
• Respond to forum posts through a Twitter-like (128 word capacity) message. - Get real-time stats on a mini mobile dashboard that indicates what courses are the most popular through a ranking system.
• Access a course, through a single click; broadcast that to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to share with your social network the event of you taking that course.

The social and mobile nexus truly rings the term “Informal Learning”. I strongly believe an organization’s ability to combine the two mediums together will usher in the next evolution of effective training for workforce efficiency.

Vinay Nilakantan, PMP
Director – Product Development and Research