Marseille Conference Report (2): The Impact of Technology on Personal Development
Theme 1: Impact of Technology on Personal Development
This theme is a new and perhaps a surprising one in a personal development conference. Many of today’s personal development professionals talk about techniques, not technologies, but individuals are becoming more and more affected by technologies combined with techniques such as distance learning in education and career tracking tools in companies.
Didier Gabin, Group Vice-President, STMicroelectronics in Geneva presented an overview of today’s HR Technologies and showed how they support a company’s competitive advantage in attracting talent, managing competencies and making knowledge about individuals available online. Examples are the individualization of career paths and unique combinations of competencies that must be identified and valued in HR systems. He underlined that people are driving HR systems even though companies still tend to focus on how technologies are driving their HR systems.
In higher education, digital learning technologies are having a major impact on the learning experience in higher and adult education. Bill Tysseling has been on the leading edge of this field at the University of California Extension and Iowa State University and now chairs the benchmarking committee of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges in assessing how technologies engage learners. He pointed out that in traditional university teaching, the number of stakeholders is limited but that when learning technologies are involved a host of new actors enter the education value chain. In the USA, specialist companies provide not only learning technology but also content.
Developments to watch that are still “in the wind” are:
- Consortia of universities to distribute education content
- certification of competencies to match testing of knowledge acquisition
- consolidated “Corporate” Universities – that offer their own degrees
- e-Portfolio standardization that may become substitutes or supplements of advanced degrees
- packaging regular updating current knowledge (for a fee) after a course has been completed
Questions such as whether professors own their teaching has been put into question. For learners, the availability of a course is anywhere, anytime that the learner decides. Questions concerning the purpose of classroom sessions, the role of the teacher and how to assess learning are in debate. According to Bill Tysseling these questions ultimately lead to a redefinition of the identity and purpose of a university in society.
During this session, I also presented a summary of the key messages from speakers who could not attend the conference due to reorganizations in their companies, Nokia and Monster.com. For Nokia, the availability of mobile devices allow individuals to work anywhere, anytime: while this will increase productivity it also has created a need for more mature self-management in order to maintain work/ life balance and to take ownership of one’s own career development. At Nokia, a key word is “engagement” which combines sustained motivation and productivity. Specific training of managers to have better personal development discussions has been shown to improve engagement of employees. Monster makes it possible for any individual to post a curriculum vitae and automatically promote himself or herself for jobs anywhere in the world at no cost. It is estimated that in Europe 30% of jobs were posted online last year, but in only two years the number could reach 70% of total job offers. With an employment market that reaches such a high degree of liquidity, individuals can no longer take a consumer attitude to job offers and must have robust personal development strategies in order to navigate their way through the market.