The Great Learning Gap

Today differentiation is not race, color or creed, its DIGITAL differentiation.

There’s a participation gap that’s emerging. It’s a gap between those who know how to use digital media and those who don’t. It’s the digital divide of the 21st Century. People who are digitally literate or digitally savvy will have higher productivity, greater leaning ability and greater ability to be independent leaders at work.

Digital Corporate Cultures of today, will have us shift from rote jobs into creative, makers and do’ers, who are masters of building local and global networks. Business is about networks of networks – peer networks, network structures and networks of communication.

Successful business of today is not about eliminating current competence, it’s about convergence of current competence with new digital competence. This is the essential element of support for current work systems today and in the future.

Learning digitally is happening more outside of work and schools than it is inside of work and schools. What that means is our current learning structures have failed us by virtue of their inability to be the leaders of digital education.

What that means is that learning is being re-engineered from providing knowledge to providing access to knowledge. We need to know more about WHERE to get the answers, than we do about the answers themselves. The digital revolution means creating companies with high technological access, high digital competence, and networks of networks that unite communication at its highest level.

While most of our young incoming work force already understand that the internet, the blackberry and iphones are simply “utilities” of multiple communication methods, the digitally illiterate lag behind in the old world order. Far from one way communication such as TV or radio, our multimedia on demand platforms of today have us engage in our work in a way that creates higher literacy, higher learning, greater experiences and multimedia platforms that are unprecedented to date! The challenge remains in the current gap of workers who are not digitally literate. This is not necessarily an age consideration but rather a MINDSET of openness toward the digital world and what it can offer.

Peer based social communication is the key to unlocking the full potential of learning in a digital age. Our peers tend to be those that we socialize with based on interest rather than age. Therefore work groups and teams with similar interests create powerful communities and networks online as they socialize, communicate, and collaborate in new ways – making the process of performance and results far greater than old methods of individuals, goals and work routines.

It just makes perfect sense that if the workforce of today and the future are driven by creativity, passion, purpose and their common interests unite on global multimedia platforms, this combination will create greater results and often unseen results, far greater than what was previously imaginable.

As we shift from a competence based economy to a digital multimedia economy, and we encourage peer networks to work together based on common interest, ultimately we will be more productive simply through a network of collaboration.

For the energy industry, then, it is imperative that we consider:

How do we bridge the current competence in the energy world with digital mastery and therefore create global collaboration of interest and solutions so readily needed to generate work success in the 21st century?