Owen Ferguson and I attended the ASTD conference in Chicago in May and it was great to be surrounded by so many people involved in learning. Apart from the sheer size of the event and the number of big name speakers who were all very accessible, the other things that caught my eye was the international aspect of the event with delegations from all over the world. It really can claim to be the biggest event in the world dedicated to learning.

But did we learn anything and what trends will impact in the UK?

My learning was on three levels, personal, things that will help GoodPractice continue to grow and industry insights and I’ve not finished learning yet. The conference is so big that you cannot hope to cover it yourself and as part of the UK delegation we made sure we covered all the sessions and events that people were interested in. We’ve still to have the full debrief, so the following is very much my personal view.

Social media and the use of it in learning was high on the agenda and with a number of authors having books about the subject just coming out it was perhaps no surprise. Tony Bingham’s, The New Social Learning and Charlene Li’s Open Leadership being two examples.

There was a strong feeling that the economy was picking up and the learning industry was going to benefit, but this was also countered by a lot of talk that organisations were not going back to the way things were done previously and an ongoing need to do more with less.

The biggest beneficiary of this was the drive towards virtual classroom delivery. This was recognised as needing very different design and delivery skills from face-to-face training. I certainly see this area growing globally and it will be interesting to see how it impacts in the UK given our smaller geography. There were some excellent presentations which clearly demonstrated how to make virtual work well.

I was interested to see if mobile learning was more prevalent in the US and slightly surprised that it was not. There was a lot of talk about being ready for mobile and waiting for the big demand. Would the iPad change the game and the development of learning apps? The general view I heard was that the providers were ready to support mobile, but didn’t feel that there was a solid demand. If and when it does arrive, the view was mobile would very quickly be a requirement for providers.

We saw some interesting new platforms and my favourite was Bloomfire which looks like a great social learning platform. Is the learning market ready for it? I’m not sure, but it is an exciting concept and I hope they succeed.

There was a lot of work on measurement with the Kirkpatrick clan doing a number of sessions at the conference and I found a couple of people starting to talk about working with organisations to guarantee performance results. They had methodologies which focussed on the business issue and established agreement of the role learning had to play in the delivery of results.

So my reflection after 10 days is that even as budgets return to learning, learning and development is still being asked to do more with less and recognising that there are new ways of achieving results. Social media is being talked about a lot, but it is still to move mainstream and be implemented in a big way. Learning how to get the best from new technologies such as social media and virtual learning are becoming key skills for learning professionals if you are going to make a significant difference to performance in your organisation.