Mobile technologies and web platforms are advancing faster than training methodologies so keeping up with the trends is getting more and more difficult. There is a growing need to develop training initiatives for a technology landscape that is evolving at a remarkable pace without having to redevelop content for each device or platform.

Today more people have mobile access than have safe drinking water and electricity. There are now as many mobile subscribers as there are people on Earth. Gartner predicted that there will be close to 1 billion smartphones sold in 2013. Despite the rapid consumer adoption of ever-advancing mobile technologies, many organizations still struggle with adding mobile to their learning strategy. As learning professionals, we will have to adopt new strategies and learn new skills in order to support workers in an increasingly mobile-first world.

Mobile has moved from an alternative delivery option to a mission imperative as companies seek ways to reach out and connect with their workers, partners, and customers through their omnipresent handsets and tablets. Accelerating learning delivery and increasing organizational performance have near universal appeal for companies of all sizes wanting to leverage a better informed, educated, and engaged audience through the many affordances mobile tools and technologies thus creating leverage.

Organizational learning infrastructures are constantly evolving, and mobile technology is now at the forefront of the new learning environment. Mobile technology provides the platform to provide informative and useful learning content to learners whenever and wherever they need or want it. Although the industry continues to stir with talk about mobile technology and the benefits it can provide to learning and development, CLOs have been slow to adopt mobile as a learning strategy. How do you best optimize mobile technology and ubiquitous connectivity for learning opportunities that have a positive impact on business performance?

The social-service workforce in Scotland is around 192,000 employees. Most of the workers are community based and have a broad range of educational backgrounds. Its learning and development group faces logistical and financial challenges due to the economic climate and the bugetary impact when employees are brought to central locations for learning. Retention from these face-to-face learning events is marginal at best.

According to ASTD Research, the most common forms of training across all industries are management and supervisory. These also represent a large percentage of training budgets in many organizations. Finding ways to address these training needs in a cost-effective way is critical, as is the need to integrate the social aspect that will unlock knowledge and share personal experience.

Determining if and how mLearning fits into a learning strategy is complicated. The temptation is to adopt mLearning because it’s the latest and greatest panacea to solve all learning woes. Much like eLearning was positioned as displacing classroom learning at its height, so mLearning is viewed by many as the golden child. Learning professionals also face the pressure of having to establish return on investment for an unproven strategy with significant up-front investments.

Any time you’re in a meeting, class, or at a conference and look around the room you’re likely to see a number of people seemingly paying more attention to their mobile phones than to the topic at hand. These devices are not going away. The challenge we now face is keeping our face-to-face audiences engaged while competing with the myriad of mobile devices. The solution to this challenge is to leverage the devices themselves.

In order to develop a learning strategy that responds to the rapidly evolving world, learning professionals need to look at the business environment differently. On the one hand, the traditional business needs of the organization will continue to be critical and must be served. On the other hand, the next generation of learning strategies must place equal importance on the actual performance and learning needs of employees. Future learning strategies will look different, be delivered differently, and be led by a new breed of learning professional.

One of TELUS’ key goals is to have a majority of its workforce work in a flexible mobile work environment. Learning strategies had to adapt to this goal. Learning could no longer simply be available on one’s laptop or in a face-to-face class. Our learning strategy had to be enhanced and updated to accommodate our growing mobile workforce.

Learning is often built on technology, taking place in different forms and locations such as eLearning, mLearning, and social media. What if learning, resources, mentorship, and performance support strategies could all be found in one place, when your employees needed them? That is the ideal scenario, and one that would provide specific measurements for observable data outcomes.