I was standing on line at Party City, waiting to pay for decorations for an upcoming birthday party for my husband (in the interests of preserving domestic harmony, I will refrain from identifying the year). The woman in front of me was scrolling through her smartphone trying to find a coupon to mitigate the cost of the 30 pink tiaras, charms, fluffy-topped pens, etc., that were piled high on the counter. After about five minutes of this, I surreptitiously (at least I thought it was surreptitiously) glanced at my watch. The cashier caught me, and with a small, superior smirk, picked up her phone to verify the time.
Apparently I am one of the increasing minority of folks in New York who uses her watch rather than her smartphone to tell time. And soon, it appears, the very function of a watch will not be keeping track of minutes and hours but rather heartbeats, steps, and blood pressure.
Clearly, I am not yet ready to make this jump, but many people are—and not just at home, but at work as corporate wellness programs continue to flourish. A survey commissioned by The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated and conducted by Harris Poll found that workers around the world are ready to embrace wearable technology at work, with nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of 9,000 online adults seeing at least one potential workplace benefit of wearable technology, including smartwatches and glasses.
That can open up a can of worms for both employees and employers—not to mention a host of training issues to consider—as you’ll find in our cover story, “Wearables at Work.” It also places a bigger burden on IT departments as they cope with even more data security and privacy issues than ever before. As a result of this and the advent of other new technologies, IT is much more integrated in multiple aspects of the business than ever before, which requires additional training for IT professionals (see “Rethinking IT Development”).
Another burgeoning use of technology in the HR field is analytics-based talent science, which gives companies the ability to aggregate job candidates’ data into sophisticated applications to be measured against the attributes and conditions of the top performers in specific positions. In “The Art of Talent Science,” we explore how organizations today are augmenting HR intuition with analytics-based talent science to both hire and retain employees.
Continuing the innovation theme, our Games & Simulations special section looks at how organizations can use those technologies—plus artificial intelligence—to engage learners in training.
If you are intrigued by innovation, you won’t want to miss our Online Learning Conference (www.onlinelearningconference.com) October 6-8 in Denver, CO, or our Training 2016 Conference & Expo (www.trainingconference.com) February 15-17, 2016, at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort featuring keynotes from Pixar and Cirque du Soleil, plus Training Top 10 Hall of Fame Town Halls, a measurement track, and Future of Learning Forum. As Walt Disney once said: “If you can dream it, you can do it.” So let’s dream on together!