After having served as electronics repair bench technician, electrical panel shop technician, controls design engineer, controls field engineer, college engineering faculty, industrial OEM technical trainer, and technical training manager for tech support there are a lot of different areas that I’ve covered. But in each role, there has been some level of learning technology that either seemed to be missing or underdeveloped despite much promise and hype.
With advancements in technology, in general use in recent years, these promising technologies in the classroom are moving from “maybe someday” to “why not today” in possibilities. However, because of the problem in much of the learning and development community of the ingrained notion of doing things “the way we’ve always done them,” whether they were outdated or inefficient or not these new technologies get a prototype or test, make a bit of noise and then get shelved because nobody knows what to do with it or how to manage it because it’s new, different, and comes with some level of expense – and of course everybody knows, training usually gets the leftover budget (aka little to nothing).
The problem then is of course the fact that “you get what you pay for” – so if you paid nothing for your training, that’s about what it’s worth.
For a career goal at this point, I’d like to change that. I’d like to take some of these promising technologies – namely Artificial Intelligence (AI), and eXtended Reality (XR) – and move them from prototype sandbox experiments to everyday use technologies as common as eBooks and eMail.
I think to successfully do that, I need to be in a role that is more than just a classroom instructor, more than just an instructional designer, more than just a curriculum planner, and more than just a training manager. I think that role would be a sort of learning architect. Someone who is in charge of the vision of not just what the content of the delivery is and the timeliness of the delivery, but also the delivery and interaction of the content itself. Someone who has something of a budget and the authority to make decisions of an exploratory nature and not simply based on data gathered from looking in the rear-view mirror of “how we’ve always done it” but looking at the forward windscreen of where we’re going in the future.
Because the future is coming at us faster than we think, and it’s hard to drive forward when looking solely at where we’ve been.
Sic itur ad astra excelsior! Excelsior!
Reaching ever higher… toward the stars… Higher!
Image generated by Copilot by request © C3EO