Having recently started sending my daughter (now aged 4½) to school I was very worried when I saw Ken Robinson's talk on schools and creativity. One of the opening statements relates to the purpose and origins of the public schooling system - unfortunately, Robinson is right – schools still operate as if their purpose is to “produce” standardised employees for an industrial era. The main problem with this is that this era is long gone (in the majority of the Western world at least). It is my experience that this intention to “produce” labourers is also present within the corporate training world. However, with today's information economy this ancient type of labourer is no longer needed – most work places need a multi-disciplined individuals capable of solving problems especially valuable in a 'cost cutting' environment where less employees are required to complete more and more diverse tasks.

Commercial organisations both in the UK and the US have, over the last few years, complained about young workers (coming out of schools and universities) not having the necessary skills for today's workplace. If we accept the purpose of the public school systems as stated in the opening paragraph than I would argue that those educational systems need to reconsider the way they teach if they are to continue fulfilling their own objectives of 'producing' a capable workforce. An example of this lack of skills can be found in the following – “A study commissioned by Hewlett Packard and conducted by Glenn Wilson, a psychologist at the University of London, confirmed that endless typing at a phone or computer keypad – along with the clearly obsessional checking for text messages – temporarily removes ten points of a user's IQ. … The hypothesized cause for this drop in IQ is that the constant distraction of messaging and emails prevents concentration on important tasks. Rapid reaction replaces thoughtful reflection.” (“the univesity of google”, Barbazon, p 76). The inability of employees to deal with today's information overload is creating what Barbazon (and the research she mentions) describes as “infomaniacs”. It is my opinion that the skills required to deal with this overload – effective time management, dealing with sensory overload, prioritising information are but a few of the skills (all within the digital context) which schools should be teaching.

However, schools, and other educational establishments are still stuck in the 19^th century mode of operating – in their article “Beyond Web 2.0: Mapping the technology landscapes of young learners” Clark et al discuss the ways in which youngsters use current technologies such as social websites and mobile phones. One of the questions raised by their work is “the potential transferability of skills between informal and formal settings.” In other words it is assumed that the skills acquired while using the web are informal and therefore not directly useful to the classroom or education. Schools are so troubled by this 'irrelevant' use of technology that “young People's 'everyday' use of digital technologies is encountering a process of de-legitimization as evidenced by the banning of mobile phone use in schools”.

In today's capitalist environment one would expect this skills gap to be bridged by an overactive training department in most organisations, surprisingly this is not the case - more and more companies understand that the majority of learning occurs outside the classroom. There can be a number of explanations for this situation (not enough research has been done on this) but to me it looks as if the speed of development of the new tools and required skills and the fact that we are a social learners translates into a failure on the part of traditional formal training.

This failure has translated well into e-learning: the majority of today's content is in the form of electronic flip books (where the “next” button is the king) which employees detest. The advent of standards like SCORM as meant that content producers can create mediocre and boring materials because of the standard. The truth is somewhere in between – while the existing standards do not dictate a boring online training product they make creativity almost impossible: in an attempt to be as efficient as possible (meaning: to be able to resell the same content to as many clients as possible) such concepts as reusability, (learning) content syndication, content repositories, training efficiency etc etc have taken the place of ideas such as knowledge retention, understanding, contextual applicability.

During the Internet bubble of the 1990s various researchers found out that one of the key elements to employee retention is the ability to offer such employees opportunity for personal growth this has also been the case with staff motivation. Staff retention and development is more important during tough economic times – a survey of 700 CIPD members held in February 2009 indicated that developing more talented in-house is the key approach (over 55%) to talent management during the recession. If e-learning is to take its proper place as an effective tool in the trainers (and managers) toolbox then 'efficiency' needs to be redefined; There is nothing wrong with an efficient learning program when efficiency means that students retain information after seeing it once. It is this efficiency that we need to strive to attain.