In fact in the early 2000s I made a business out of helping companies select and implement all these tools, and our original business was called I had the opportunity to meet many brilliant minds in this market at DigitalThink (a pioneer). An enormous industry of content developers, tools, and learning management systems was born. (I worked for an LMS company in 1998 and we called it “learning on demand” awaiting this moniker to emerge)ĭesigners found they could build instructional content in HTML and Flash (Flash was an early scripting language that let us build movies and animations in the browser). In the 1990s, as web browsers hit the market. which gave birth to the Training Management System and later the Learning Management System (LMS).ġ990s: E-Learning is Born – The LMS Market Explodes So now you needed a database to store all this data. This technology later evolved into SCORM, which let us track any form of e-learning content in a database, bookmark your location, track completion, and store your score.
Once PC networking emerged, developers created a tracking standard called AICC ( Aviation Industry CBT Committee), which let us track learner progress on a server. While this content was useful, it only ran on a single PC, so we couldn’t really track progress well. Vendors like CBT Systems (now Skillsoft) built large libraries of content, and as PC’s got smarter the content became more complex. These courses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop, but were more scaleable than teachers, so companies bought them. We built expensive programs that included video, animations, interactivities, and assessments. When the PC was invented (1981), trainers learned to build video disk and CD-ROM based training. (I carried around a ton of them, and they were heavy!) They worked, but were rigid, hard to change, and somewhat colorless. The “foils” were written or printed and were often hand authored by designers. The technology was slide projectors and “foils” (plastic laminated slides). In the 1970s and 1980s, when I started my career, we learned in classrooms.
As the following chart shows, over the last 20 years we’ve been through four evolutions, each driven by technological and economic change. The corporate training industry has been around for decades and it has always been impacted by new technology. How Corporate Training Evolved: From Classroom to PC to e-Learning to Digital While we often think of training as programs or courses, a new paradigm has arrived, one I call “Learning in the Flow of Work.” Let me explain. The corporate training market is over $200 billion around the world and it’s going through a revolution.