Digitization and flexibility have been the trends in the continuing education sector for years. Especially for companies, the theses on development in the next five years are interesting: Modern digital training is flexible, mobile, and saves time. We will show you, based on the four most important theses, how to bring your company to the top with digital training methods!
Trend Analysis: The Future is Digital
Studies and data are particularly interesting when absolute professionals are asked for the survey. This is also the case here: Since 1993, the Wuppertal Circle has been surveying the trends in continuing education regarding market and methods development annually.
The Wuppertal Circle, as an industry association, unites 46 educational institutions of the German economy. In addition to active exchange and quality assurance, the industry association has made it its task to collect and monitor trends and market developments in continuing education. The results of this annual evaluation can be found on their website.
We reviewed the detailed evaluation results and discovered many theses that impressively show:
Digitization is the key to the future of the continuing education sector.
The following four theses offer potential for the digitization of learning forms - especially for mobile learning forms such as e-learning. The magic word is flexibility!
2 Theses: How Continuing Education Becomes More Mobile
The importance of digitization is steadily increasing: More and more companies are relying on mobile workplaces or hiring people remotely. As a result, communication over online media inevitably increases: "space" is increasingly becoming "virtual space".
Thesis 1: "Digital learning and teaching platforms will replace the seminar room as the most important place of learning in a few years"
The result of the study shows that there is no consensus on the question of whether seminars will be replaced by digital learning platforms. Approval and rejection are almost on par.
At first glance, this thesis directly divides continuing education professionals: 42% approval and 45% rejection clearly show that completely abstaining from seminars is out of the question, even though digital learning forms are undeniably gaining relevance. More important than the complete replacement of face-to-face seminars is to find a symbiosis between traditional and digital learning.
Potential for Companies:
The learning form "seminar" is not very flexible: time and place are always fixed. To make the training more flexible for your participants, you can loosen up seminars by offering content in an online accompaniment. The personal contact during face-to-face events is combined with self-directed learning in virtual spaces. This combination is also called "blended learning" and has been the trend in the continuing education sector for several years!
Thesis 2: "One task of educational service providers is to organize collegial learning in the virtual space also regionally and internationally."
More than two-thirds of respondents agree that collegial learning must also be organized regionally and internationally.
Three-quarters (76%) of the surveyed continuing education professionals agreed: Collegial learning should go beyond regional boundaries. And this thesis is not only relevant for freelance trainers but especially for companies: Particularly for companies with multiple locations, the fixed attachment to one place quickly becomes a problem. Here, learning models are needed that work without spatial constraints.
Potential for Companies:
Whether external trainers, coaches, or speakers are brought in, or whether you have internal contacts for employee continuing education - spatial flexibility is an absolutely necessary trend. Blended learning offers various models to combine face-to-face events with online content. This way, you and your client save a lot of time, the work downtime remains low, and even remote employees can participate in the education without travel expenses.
For example, a face-to-face appointment can be the basis for a longer online accompaniment. In the online accompaniment, participants receive exercises to consolidate their new knowledge. Additionally, the trainer can use online impulses to prepare employees for an intensive seminar for joint results discussion. This means: little spatial constraint with much potential for preparation and consolidation of the learned material.
2 Theses: How Training Becomes More Time-Flexible
A second important change in continuing education concerns the temporal organization: Flexible working hours, together with the decoupling from a fixed workplace, increasingly require time-independent continuing education. In the study by the Wuppertal Circle, theses on temporal flexibility were also established, which offer exciting development opportunities:
Thesis 3: "Presence and seminar times will be supplemented by online and web-based learning and thus significantly shortened."
Almost 80% of respondents agree that online learning can significantly shorten presence times as a complement.
78% approval shows, what you may have also experienced: Getting all employees together for a training session "at one table" (or in a seminar room) is not that easy. Different working hours complicate time planning, and a multi-hour or even multi-day face-to-face training costs valuable working time for participants and companies.
Potential for Companies:
Impulses, exercises, small tasks - such learning bites can be wonderfully integrated by the trainer through e-learning, thus sensibly complementing the face-to-face appointments. Participants can flexibly integrate the learning units into their own schedules. Through this division of content, presence times can be shortened and used more effectively - for example, for discussion rounds or situational exercises.
Thesis 4: "Educational offerings will be provided on mobile devices (e.g., tablets, smartphones)."
9 out of 10 respondents definitely expect that educational offerings will also be provided on tablets or smartphones in the next five years.
Over 90% of continuing education professionals are sure: In the next five years, the development will massively shift towards the use of smartphones, tablets, and the like. After all, in 2018, over 80% of Germans owned a smartphone - and the trend remains on the rise in all industrialized countries around the world!
Potential for Companies:
Since the blended learning concept is based on connecting face-to-face and online learning, a suitable online platform is, of course, the key to success. With the platform, the trainer can also provide content for large participant groups or centrally manage different projects for different teams, departments, or employee groups. Thus, with the right online platform, smartphones and other mobile devices can also be integrated into continuing education and serve as a "training room for your pocket".
Strong Future Forecast for Blended Learning
As you can see, blended learning offers advantages for continuing education in companies for every thesis. It is no wonder, then, that 76% of continuing education professionals forecast strong growth for the integration of face-to-face seminars with blended learning components in the next five years.
76% of respondents expect a (strong) increase for face-to-face seminars with blended learning components in the next five years.
Let’s summarize the theses:
Face-to-face learning will not be replaced by digital learning forms in the coming years but sensibly supplemented.
Collegial learning will become spatially flexible and better planable through the combination of face-to-face and online learning.
Face-to-face appointments can be shortened and utilized much more effectively through blended learning.
Smartphones and tablets become individual and time-independent training spaces for your pocket through learning apps.
For companies, this means that blended learning is not a temporary trend for adventurous freelancers: Blended learning is a learning model with a future. The trend analysis shows that the combination of face-to-face and online learning has great potential to make continuing education in your company spatially and temporally flexible - without compromising on effectiveness!
