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Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Hot Topics in Training - A Crude (but mildly interesting) Analysis

Okay, I had too much time on the plane on the way back and was thinking about the question that someone asked me at the Training 2006 Conference... It was something like "What ever happened to Performance Support? I don't hear about it anymore."

It's funny how topics come and go. And you can tell what's hot (or at least what vendors think they can sell and conference organizers think is interesting) based on what's being discussed at various conferences.

So, I ran a script based on an online service that gave me a keyword count over the list of Titles of Sessions at Training 2005 as compared to Training 2006. This is very crude and not very accurate, but it suggests a few, mildly curious trends...
20052006Change%Chg
games023231000%
shoestring0331000%
evaluation132200%
interactive5138160%
leadership253150%
flash374133%
collaboration121100%
project69350%
lms23150%
management1520533%
rapid34133%
simulations1619319%
trainer67117%
training4350716%
development1011110%
knowledge9900%
authoring4400%
delivering5500%
effective5500%
blended4400%
design2625-1-4%
learning10273-29-28%
software64-2-33%
accelerated32-1-33%
performance179-8-47%
technology84-4-50%
tools84-4-50%
powerpoint63-3-50%
roi94-5-56%
assessment31-2-67%
strategy/ic103-7-70%
virt clsrmm51-4-80%
enterprise81-7-88%
aligning81-7-88%
results90-9-100%
metrics30-3-100%
blog000
wiki000


A couple of things that jumped out at me:

1) Blogs, Wikis, Collaboration are still not on the radar of corporate training. More on this is another post coming soon.

2) ROI & Metrics were big last year - seems less interesting this year.

3) Games were a big topic.

4) Strategy and strategic were way down.

5) Training & trainer increased, learning was down. Yikes!

6) Closest to eLearning 2.0 was Marc's Beyond eLearning.

I hope you find this at least mildly interesting. :)

Oh, and if anyone knows how to use a Tag Cloud or Keyword Cloud to do this for me automatically the next time, I'd love to hear it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice blog... useful contents..

Anonymous said...

You call it crude...but I think it's an eye-opener!