Tech trends to watch as online learning accelerates

The popularity of online learning continues to soar, with a PwC study of 32,600 Australian workers revealing that a majority (75 per cent) were willing to retrain themselves to remain employable in the future.

A surge in remote working and easy availability of a range of online courses during and after the pandemic is driving this shift to e-learning, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimating that almost half of all Australian adults are undertaking some form of online training every year.

This is very encouraging, but the journey to digitalisation remains a rocky road for many enterprises. Legacy industries like manufacturing, pharma, and construction have been slow to adopt technology to engage their workforce in the new normal.

Additionally, a study by Gartner revealed that only half of Australian employees feel they have the skills they will need for their job in three years’ time. Clearly, there’s a growing chasm between what people expect and what employers can deliver. Organisations will need to address this gap if they aspire to retain people amid the Great Resignation.

To effectively upskill and reskill the workforce through online learning, organisations can use the latest trends in emerging technologies to their advantage. For instance, augmented reality and virtual reality (ARVR) have enormous potential to shape the future of learning. Once used in commercial real estate to build augmented reality models for stock keeping units (SKUs), it has several use cases today, especially in online learning when participating in a real-life situation can make learning practical and highly engaging.

Additionally, cloud computing offers many exciting opportunities in the field of online learning. According to research by GlobalData, Australia’s cloud computing market is forecast to grow by 12.5 per cent to reach US$14.1 billion in 2025, stimulated by large-scale digital transformation. The growing demand for software as a service (SaaS) and ongoing supply chain hurdles is expected to drive the acceleration of cloud adoption in the medium term.

Despite its potential, legacy businesses have been slow to adopt cloud strategies. Many organisations are put off by the perceived high cost of migrating to the cloud and changes to existing infrastructure. But integrating data is getting easier and cheaper. The best part is that it can help organisations build products to increase relevance, make better recommendations, and improve personalisation.

This year, the biggest challenge for organisations is to identify skills gaps and support internal mobility. Despite the availability of skills marketplace tools that assess and facilitate the management of roles and skills in the business, many of them don’t come with content to actually make up for the difference or enhance skills.

However, partnering with the skills marketplace to combine know-how and role taxonomies and tools with content can result in better outcomes for enterprise customers. This enables managers and learning and development (L&D) teams to identify relevant skill gaps and empower people with appropriate learning content. Go1 does this quite successfully – we aggregate workplace training content and courses from a host of content providers to deliver effective learning.    

It’s not going to be smooth sailing, but organisations will need to make the hard choice between imparting technical skills in the short term or investing in digital assets for long-term growth. By leveraging the power of online learning for the latter, organisations can successfully navigate both the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, as well as boost employee retention as workers strive for lifelong learning support.

By Thomas Wythe, chief information officer, Go1