Tuesday 21 June 2016
Our Learning Styles Survey attracted responses from over 80 professionals with a background in accounting. The survey was designed to investigate the views of executives towards online training and the results were fascinating. We've added some highlights in this edition but we would urge you to read our .
This article compares our own discoveries with similar surveys in the realm of professional development. We've done this for two important reasons:
- to see if our community of accounting professionals is different from other professional communities
- by looking at earlier surveys to see if trends can be identified
We've found the annual Learning and Development survey of the useful for comparison purposes.
The IASeminars survey asked the views of those undertaking professional development while the CIPD survey gathers the views of the staff who provide learning and development in organisations of various sizes. This gives us the opportunity to view statistics from both a learner and teacher point of view. We have found this holistic approach invaluable as we have shaped and developed our brand new IPSAS Online course!
So to the results and comparisons… Three-quarters of all organisations surveyed by the CIPD use learning technologies with this figure rising to 88% in the public sector. This closely matches 85% of the IASeminars correspondents who stated that they have experience of online learning.
Both the CIPD survey and IASeminars find that face-to-face/classroom instruction is both most popular and most common.
"Face-to-face delivery is still clearly popular. One in three of those who use learning technologies currently deliver more than three-quarters of their L&D activities completely through face-to-face experiences and more than two-thirds report that less than a quarter of activities are delivered through learning technologies or blended learning." CIPD Report
While the CIPD report tells us what organisations offer their staff it is interesting to note that while two-thirds of our respondents prefer classroom training nearly a quarter express a preference for online learning. The CIPD survey also asked how the use of technologies in learning is expected to develop in the next year - those offering training completely using learning technologies show a large expected increase. However, this predictive estimate should be handled with care because the 2014 CIPD report compared predictions from three years of earlier reports with what actually happened. They found that each year the actual use of learning technologies grew only slightly while the predicted growth in every year remained much greater. In reality change is happening but more slowly than expected!
Perhaps the most significant finding of the CIPD report as far as learning technologies are concerned is the anticipated growth of mobile devices in training. This is in line with the general growth in web traffic:
"As of 2015, worldwide mobile phone internet user penetration was 52.7 percent. In 2017, figures suggest that more than 63.4 percent of mobile phone users will access online content through their devices." ()
While classroom training is still expected to be the single largest mode of learning in the near future the CIPD report concluded that three other modes were rising significantly:
