Why Learnapalooza Matters for The Future of Tech
Learnapalooza is a conference dedicated to ‘The Future of Learning’. Now in it’s fifth year, the conference is headed by two experts in adult learning, Darren Nerland and Erin Petershick, who brought both experience and energy to the space that really made this conference a game changer.

It is in all of the ways Learnapalooza goes beyond the slide decks — beyond the buzz, and straight into what it means to do meaningful work that makes it such a powerful event.

With Learnapalooza sitting firmly in the Learning and Development space I expected team building exercises, inspirational quotes and graphs on changing workplace demographics. If you’re looking for a crash course on L&D buzzwords and trends then worry not, you’ll get that here. But it is in all of the ways Learnapalooza goes beyond the slide decks — beyond the buzz, and straight into what it means to do meaningful work that makes it such a powerful event. I’m here to tell you just exactly what that means for the future of tech.

We’re firmly in the Fourth Industrial Revolution now: computing, data science and artificial intelligence are the new prime movers. To give you a sense of the pace, this means that 77% of current jobs will require new technical skills and over half of the highest demand jobs on Linkedin did not exist 10 years ago. There’s no sign of this slowing down, and no one can quite predict what the world will look like in 2030.

That’s not all that much of a scary thought, if you boil it down. It means hiring based on ability to learn, not on the skill sets brought on arrival. It means building a workplace culture of learning that allows everyone to thrive.

When new technologies come in, they are much more complex and interactive than before. No modules, courses, or certificates can do the work of showing demonstrable knowledge of these new tools, and that’s a problem. A simple solution may be bringing workplace learning back into an apprenticeship style: when learning to use new tools and tech- a user will be more likely to retain both attention and information by connecting the dots for them through the experience of it’s use. Create a culture of coaching in your workplace for your team to thrive.

We should also be building workplace cultures that thrive on self-directed learning. Carving the time and space in your culture to make that happen allows for the diffusion of new knowledge across a team, and prevents burnout for the workers who are closest to the new tech on-boarding.

When you work on learning and development in tech, you’re really getting to the heart of the issue in the field: working in tech means you never stop learning a new coding language, software system, just keeping up the pace of today’s digital innovation. We can only do it by taking the best learning and development practices out there and situating them in this new world where people move at the speed-of-tech. Learnapalooza exists to bridge that gap in a powerful way, and I can’t wait to see how it changes the tech world in the years to come.
['Sal Kimmich']
['Technews', 'Learning And Development', 'Technology', 'Future Of Work', 'Tech']