As the pace of change increases, many organizations in both the public and private sectors have recognized an urgent need to achieve greater operational agility. Operational agility depends on a
number of factors, including efficient organizational structure and elimination of unnecessary bureaucracy, but perhaps the most important factor in operational agility is workforce agility – where an
agile workforce is one that can be reconfigured quickly in response to changing conditions, with workforce members quickly adopting new roles and responsibilities at high levels of performance. As
this drive toward workforce agility accelerates, it will require that organizations adopt a dramatically expanded view of workforce learning and the technologies that they need to embrace to support that learning.

At Accenture, we believe that advances in mobile communications, media, knowledge-management, software architectures, and simulation technologies are key technology enablers that will lead to the required step change in organizations’ abilities to realize workforce agility through new modes of training and performance support. Together with improvements in standards for integration of
learning and knowledge-management systems, the technological advances will provide the means to deliver more effective models of instruction, at the place and time of need. Improvements will include:  embedding instruction directly into workflow, interleaving learning with execution; and conveniently connecting learners to the best human-delivered instruction, without regard to geography, through increasingly effective virtual classroom and remote mentoring technologies. Emerging learning technologies will provide organizations that understand how to leverage them effectively with key competitive advantages by enabling dramatically increased flexibility regarding the location, timing, and form of learning activities.

In this white paper we examine why learning technologies will become a crucial competitive weapon, and we point toward the new forms of learning technologies that will be needed to enable the agile workforce of tomorrow’s high-performance organizations.