One of the biggest gains post-pandemic has been the immense growth in how workers consume content to achieve their career goals.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, online learning rates more than doubled from 19% in 2016-17 to 55% in 2020-21. Online is also the most common means of delivering work-related training today.
A surge in remote working and easy access to a range of online skills development programmes have accelerated this shift.
Forward-thinking organisations have been able to arm their employees with the gift of lifelong learning but many are still lagging behind. These businesses and institutions need to make significant changes to their business models and the workplace to keep up with rapid digitalisation post-pandemic. Re-skilling and up-skilling are top priorities but many frontline industries like manufacturing are still struggling to re-orient their workforce.
Despite organisational barriers, employees are enthusiastic about re-skilling using new tech. A PwCstudy of 32,600 Australian workers found that a majority (75%) were willing to retrain themselvesto remain employable in the future. Australian workers also expressed a desire to be digitally equipped to cope with new workplace demands.
Organisations must now choose between imparting technical skills in the short term or investing in digital assets for long-term growth. 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. To ensure that this gap is closed quickly, organisations will need to leverage the following tech trends to re-shape the workforce in 2023 and beyond:
1. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality tech uptake
Immersive technology has enormous potential to shape the future of online learning. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (ARVR) is used effectively in commercial real estate to build augmented reality models for Stock Keeping Units (SKUs). With the acceleration of the metaverse and remote working, ARVR has the potential to improve workplace performance and employee engagement even further by allowing user access to a variety of high-quality content providers under one roof.
Go1 operates as a catalyst in this space. We pool platforms and content providers together and deliver learning to people in a way that allows them to effectively interact in their own environment or elsewhere. There’s no doubt that the next pivot is ARVR, and there’s a real opportunity to accelerate it by putting together the technology and the providers who know the learning and the outcomes they want to create. We also anticipate that video will evolve into ARVR or become more interactive over the next 12 months.
2. Rise in cloud adoption
Australia’s cloud computing market is tipped to grow by 12.5% to reach US$14.1 billion in 2025, stimulated by large-scale digital transformation, according to research by GlobalData. The growing demand for Software as a Service (SaaS) and ongoing supply chain hurdles are likely to accelerate cloud adoption in the medium term. Legacy businesses such as manufacturing, especially in pharmaceutical and construction, have been slow to adopt cloud strategies.
However, they may find it is now inevitable because of supply chain disruptions and the growing challenge of managing operations via physical facilities. Those that adopt cloud-based technologies and learning platforms in the future will benefit from more efficient data collection, analytics and reporting, along with improved ROI.
3. Reduction in cost of computing and storage
Reducing cloud costs has become more important than ever as organisations explore practical ways to do this without making changes to existing infrastructure. Fortunately, integrating, storing and processing data is getting easier and cheaper. This has helped organisations build products to increase relevance, make better recommendations, and improve personalisation.
As a result, many are able to build and take new products and services to market. We’re expecting a much bigger push into the personalisation of tech space over the next 12 months as a result of enormous reductions in the cost of storage and computing.
4. Addressing future skills gaps
Looking ahead, it will be critical for organisations to support internal mobility at the workplace. There are several skills marketplace tools that assess and facilitate the management of roles, skills and competency in a business. Unfortunately, many of them don’t come with content to address specific gaps. Combining the skills marketplace and their know-how with the right content can enable managers and organisations to empower people with appropriate online learning content and deliver better outcomes for their lifelong learning journey.
Thomas Wythe is Go1’s chief information officer and advisor and also a very high-energy product owner, senior technologist, and business strategist who loves building teams that build products that change the world.