Approaching eLearning Design for the New Generation

“The workforce is changing.” 

Who doesn’t love a good truism from time to time? With each passing year, there are inevitable demographic changes as aging workers retire or advance to new roles, and the positions vacated are filled by younger workers. This is nothing new.

As a professional educator and communicator, I have to figure out how we’re going to transfer the wealth of earned knowledge about our industry and company to those who are entering the workforce. And I'm not worried. That’s right, I have zero qualms about what’s going to happen and about creating detailed plans for the assimilation of Gen Alpha into our corporate collective. Why? Because resistance is futile. Yes, I’m a Star Trek fan. Why do you ask?

But, really, what do I mean that "resistance is futile"? The answer has to do with the mass and inertia of corporate culture. We, the formerly rebellious workforce previously intent on changing the world, have, by and large, already make the impact that we were going to make. 

Over the past 20 years, the workplace has become more personable and responsible to those whose labor gets the job done; therapy is a thing that we don’t scoff at or consider indicative of weakness; and we talk about styles of communication so that we can all get along better. I’m proud of those changes, but I admit that, having been blasted out of the cannon of college, I have already made most of my impact on the mass known as "corporate culture."

I look forward to experiencing the changes that our young people make on society and world culture and, to be clear, I expect nothing short of greatness from them.  However, just like the rest of us who spoke shorthand or a generational dialect with our friends, we all understood that, in the workplace, the common vernacular is the appropriate tongue.

I do not expect to order my teams to translate all of our onboarding materials. I don’t intend to “de-confuse” my product trainings by taking them out of the standard English of our day to “add rizz to my stuff because some delulu NPCs start walking in the door thinking that they’re going to low-key slay it. No cap.”

However, with the help of our new colleagues, my teams and I will, by necessity, evolve our outmoded styles or techniques of communication so that we are able to reach as many people as possible, young and old, before we have to start fretting about what we’re going to do when Generation Beta comes knocking on our doors. After all, good principles of andragogy tend to stay the same: active learning, keep it relevant to real life, encourage the learners to call upon and relate to life experiences, etc.  What evolves is the setting, the tools by which we ply our trade and communicate with others.  It will always be imperative that we assimilate and adapt in order to ensure that we are providing effective, efficient training.

My colleagues, Donald John and Ben Rogers, and I discussed this subject in more detail in a recent webinar, From Theory to Practice: How to Engage Today’s Digital Learners.

In the end, my personal take on this impending “crisis” of intergenerational mixing is this: As long as we’re ready to accept each other for who we are and listen with open ears and open minds, I think we’ll get along just fine.