Keep your SITEs on the Future of Corporate Training

Conferences. We’ve all been there, right? A long succession of concurrent sessions, interrupted with meals and punctuated with social events. I recently attended the 2012 Society of Insurance Trainers & Educators (SITE) conference in Virginia, and it was unlike any conference I’ve been to. They went out of their way to make the first timers feel comfortable and it was the friendliest conference I’ve ever attended. And, there was also a lot of great thought and theory packed into a couple of days. Here are some highlights of where the insurance training industry is headed:

Social Communities: Building social communities needs be an enterprise solution, and they should be based on learner insights. Social communities take time and diligent effort to get started and to keep going. A key point was to establish an authentic voice in your social communities.

Corporate Universities: There was a lot of buzz around one insurance agency’s Learning University. They set up a virtual university (with actual campus maps and buildings developed by a university map company). It was a great front-end organization tool that housed their larger backend LMS learning technology. Learners were responding well, and the training and development department even toilet-papered the virtual campus on April Fool’s day. Clever.

Mobile Learning: Venturing into mobile learning seems to be the mantra of many internal training and development departments. Before going mobile, it is vital to develop a strategy that takes into account design and technical capabilities. It won’t be enough to just convert existing courses, there needs to be an approach that fully embraces the functionality of mobile devices.

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