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CLO Magazine just reported on a survey that was done on emerging markets using Web 2.0 tools.  It’s worth taking a look at their write-up as they have some interesting findings in the data.

The most compelling message to me, though, was that people will be constantly “wired” and accustomed to working with these 2.0 tools that many today may feel are foreign.  This will be a critical understanding for the next crop of Chief Learning Officers – if their workforce of the future is comfortable collaborating in communities and with people all over the world in their personal and professional lives you can bet they’ll be looking for jobs that allow them to continue that trend.  To take someone of this mindset and stick them in traditional training classes and prevent them from peer-to-peer learning will be doing a large disservice to the workforce, the organization and customers.  

What opportunities are there in your organization to begin incorporating the Web 2.0 tools slowly before the entire workforce demands it?  Here’s a hint…think less about the tools/technology and look for opportunities to help.  If multiple people on a sales team are passing around many drafts of a proposal consider putting it on a wiki until it’s in final form; if disparate teams are working on common projects/problems/innovations but don’t know each other a social networking app may be helpful.  Web 2.0 is really just an enabler to get us back to the natural way we want to learn and interact but often can’t…

We just toured the new offices of one of our clients and it’s pretty impressive.  The workspace design certainly incorporates the ability to have impromptu meetings and mixes that with great light, nice views and world-class art thrown in just for fun.

Here’s a write-up on the building.

It will be interesting to see how this space impacts the workforce of this large global organization.  They are beginning to embrace some elements of Learning 2.0 such as communities of practice, knowledge management and social networking and the move to the new digs coincidentally happened at the same time.  

While I feel strongly that the physical environment has a strong impact on these other areas of informal learning we had absolutely no say in how this building was arranged – but it’ll be a nice bonus that we are able to continue our project operating out of such a progressive environment.