Clark Quinn presented this week at the CLO Fall 2009 Symposium. I asked him what the highlights were for him. His response:

There’s a trend towards lifting the CLO game. It’s clearly no longer about meeting training needs; you aren’t seeing a lot of talk about corporate universities. Instead, you’re seeing phrases like “Peak Performance”, “doing more with less”, and session titles that include: smarter, faster, urgent, and impact. The economic climate has clearly had an impact.
It’s good that organizations are looking to get more strategic about learning, because it’s clear that despite that having been under discussion for years, there’s still a lot of room to improve. Rebecca Ray of Mastercard, 2008 CLO of the year, reported that fully 40% of CLOs she surveyed were not tying their metrics to business outcomes. Jay Cross and I, on behalf of TogetherLearn, presented data including that 77% say that their people aren’t developing fast enough to meet the needs of the business and 63% replied to the contrary to the statement “our corporate culture values and encourages transparency and openness” for just two examples of missed opportunities. And they’re not considering, by and large, potential audiences such as supply-chain partners and customers.
There is recognition of the opportunity for technology to start playing a more significant role. For example, there is a lot more interest in technology to reach distributed audiences, though an understanding of tools isn’t widespread. As William Gibson said, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” For example, 48% said their people can’t locate in-house experts when they need them. Awareness of micro-blogging tools like Twitter and it’s corporate equivalents (e.g. Yammer, Present.ly, & Status.net) is relatively sparse. As an indication, the tweetstream from the conference (#CLOSymposium) is pretty sparse.
That said, the sessions that are presenting on web 2.0 tools and informal learning are well-attended, and awareness of the opportunities is obvious. It’s clear that the audience is recognizing the message that prepared courses aren’t going to be capable of meeting the increasing rate of change and the need for agility. Whether it’s growing awareness, or the economic pressures, change is coming, and e-learning (in the broad sense of the term, including performance support, collaboration tools, social networks, etc.) has an increasing role to play. Here’s hoping it’s well played.