I drive a vehicle that has been converted to run on compressed natural gas (CNG). I bought this vehicle because I wanted a pickup truck but didn’t want to pollute the air with its “not so great” gas mileage and pay the high gas prices. CNG burns clean and is less than a third of the price of gas.
I'm considered an early adopter in this situation because the technology is new and sometimes inconvenient. Though early adopters jump on the band wagon, despite the potential bumps and hurtles, they often reap great benefits. When the concept of Web 2.0 came about in the learning and development field, the early adopters saw great success. A recent study by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), entitled Better, Smarter, Faster: How Web 3.0 Will Transform Learning in High Performance Organizations states, “The effort the companies on the cutting edge have put into adopting these new [Web 2.0] technologies for learning has paid off, in both learning effectiveness and market performance.”
While many companies, 80% of respondents to the above study, are still working on integrating Web 2.0 technologies on some levels, other companies are already forging ahead by looking to evolve into Web 3.0 because they have seen the direct correlation between learning effectiveness and market performance. It doesn’t matter if you are a call center with a few employees or a large software company, anyone can and should adopt the new learning technologies to stay ahead in the marketplace.
In my next blog, I will pull further information from the ASTD study to share with you, because I see how we can all take advantage of the new wave of learning. As the study points out, Web 3.0 is not a replacement of Web 2.0, “but rather an evolution of it.” Every call center has a workforce to train. Due to the tight economic times, the management of learning has come under the executive microscope and in some cases the only hope of surviving.
