"Opinion Piece" was introduced in 2004. Each month an industry specialist was invited to share their view on that month's Community theme. In this Opinion Piece, Adrian Morgan ponders:  Does professional development have a future?

It is ironic that at the very time when the demands on professionals’ skills have never been greater, appropriate ongoing development of those skills is becoming harder to achieve for many people.  Our own industry of learning and education is a good case in point.  What leads me to say this?

Effective ongoing professional development opportunities are increasingly essential because of at least three trends acting together:

• The escalating demands from consumer and clients, governments, courts and even insurance companies for professionals to deliver consistent high quality services, fully satisfying the expanding expectations in relation to the duty of care
   
  
• The body of skills and knowledge required by modern professionals is growing in scope whilst also changing (often rapidly) – professional disciplines are constantly changing their notions of ‘best practice’ and the members of those disciplines are expected to adhere to these.
   
  
• Many disciplines are required to carry out their functions in increasingly difficult environments – for instance, many corporate trainers are facing ever shrinking budgets; school teachers are having to deal with increasingly complex social problems among the students.

To have a reasonable prospect of managing these challenges, today’s professionals must have ongoing access to comprehensive professional development opportunities.

Yet there are powerful forces making it difficult to achieve this access in practice.  For instance:

• Cost savings – an increasing number of employers who were previously prepared to offer their employees support for their professional development, either by providing time to attend sessions or by meeting the costs or both, have withdrawn this support, often in the name of efficiency or cost savings. 
   
  
• Workforce casualisation – employer-sponsored development has more typically been directed to full-time employees.  With an increasingly casualised and contracted workforce, the pool of full-time employees who would be seen as natural candidates for the employer sponsored development is diminishing.
   
  
• Longer working hours – the average number of hours that Australians are working has been increasing significantly over the last few years.  This shrinks the available time away from the workplace for people to pursue their own development.

Taken together, and without deliberate remedial action, these forces could have serious unintended consequences for employers and employees alike. 

Individuals’ future employability depends on their maintaining contemporary professional skills.  Quoting Dr Dale Spender speaking at one of our recent conferences, “If you’re not learning today, you won’t be earning tomorrow”.  Contemporary skills also help to keep you out of the court system.

For employers, the international evidence is accumulating that organisations that invest in the development of their employees perform demonstrably better on a range of indices, than those that invest less.  Short-term savings in development costs can be very quickly overtaken by losses in productivity, performance and value.

So to what extent can technology-assisted learning assist in bridging the gap between need and delivery of professional development? 

It seems that some of the ways in which technology can assist are:

• if the expense of preparing the learning materials can be spread across a large number of people with a similar development need, the unit cost of delivery could be relatively low
   
  
• if an online learning opportunity is asynchronous, professionals can select the best time for them to do their learning (subject to them having access to appropriate technology)
   
  
• Events like webinars (online seminars) may eliminate travel time which may help people with very busy lives, as well as overcome the tyranny of distance for those in remote regions.

Certainly AITD (Australian Institute of Training and Development) intends to pilot the use of webinars this year as one important initiative for our members.

But if past practice is anything to go on, there is a risk is that we’ll burden technology-supported learning with the responsibility for solving the whole professional development challenge.  Inevitably, this sets it up for failure.

The real solutions lie in a mature debate among all stakeholders including governments, employers, individual professionals and the professional associations about how to best ensure that all professionals receive the ongoing support for their development that they need.  And technology-supported learning will be just part of that picture, albeit an important one.

Adrian Morgan is the Chief Executive of the Australian Institute of Training and Development, the leading specialist national association for professionals involved in training, learning and human resource development in Australia.