Executive-level participants and leaders from the most powerful training companies representing 40+ countries participated in the LLPA Summit of 2019. It was during the later afternoon panel session where interesting topics were discussed amongst professionals in the learning space. Topics about new and emerging technologies, leadership in the cloud computing era, data-as-a-currency and change management were discussed. The feedback shared by the panel and leading learning members in the room was invaluable.

One of the topics deeply discussed was that of the role of learning partners in the future – The walls of traditional brick-and-mortar classroom learning have been broken down to introduce more free and open learning for all. While more content is distributed online, how will the learning partners remain valuable in the market? According to Oracle, the learners of today are still not completely comfortable learning advanced technologies on their own, advanced learning will continue to require classroom-focused environments to be successful. What is also very important says Partner Sales Manager, Alexander Swoboda is that there be more focus on the term learning instead of training.

Ronald Bekelaar from Virsoft states that the validity of learning frameworks two years ago is still imminent, the expertise continues to remain with the learning providers, and they have a very important role to play.

“You, the members of the LLPA are trusted advisors to customers, developing learning roadmaps for delegates, taking the wealth of content to the customer to get them the results they are looking for to make them successful on the platform they want to adopt.” Christopher Burr, AWS. “We need the traditional option with the ability to have public schedules that host 1-2 delegates.”

Customers want to know how they can support their organization says Antoine Bonenkamp, Regional Business Development Head EMEA at PeopleCert – “with products like Agile, Prince2 and ITIL, focused on the practicalities of change management, best practices and agile environments still need brick and mortar environments and I would not expect this to change in the future.”

Together, the LLPA and it’s 33 members aim to help scale and reach customers in ways that suit them, employed as trusted learning partners, hosting events with partners and sharing resources to drive knowledge in the world.

Again, the term ‘trusted advisor’ emerged when Pearson VUE said, “training providers need to become trusted advisors and offer broader, deeper and more entangled solutions.” During the offset of these conversations, it also became clear that modern learning requires a learn-to-culture approach, understanding that cultures have distinctive learning style patterns and that great variation among individuals within groups means that educators must use diverse teaching strategies with all students. Culturally adapted content could support better fitting deliveries across regions in the future.

Learning, practices and experiences are in a constant state of change. It is now the learning providers challenge to allow individuals to demonstrate their knowledge through just-in-time learning and knowing that the distribution of content to the right customer at the right time is what makes the value of training brick and mortar still prominent.

During the summit, Sovelto, member of the LLPA received the Best Practice Award 2019 for being the world’s first to host VR-Training on 5G.

Overall, the summit in Slovenia was a great success and we look forward to hosting another in 2020, an age where leaders predict that a blended approach will characterize the workplace to prevent tomorrow’s talent crisis, and where artificial intelligence and big data in learning have only begun to scratch the surface.