I have been an ASTD member for about four years. I did it as part of the CPLP process (one of my clients paid). I am still a member even though I pay out of my own pocket, now.

When I did the CPLP two colleagues decided not to participate because they thought it did not pertain to technology training. It does.

ASTD, though, is highly focused on training that is soft-skills related, at least if I judge by talking to other members and by magazine contents. Yes, there is some treatment of repetitive skills training, but I have found few, if any, articles on teaching creative process, thinking skills and the like.

I have been doing technology training for 25 years or so. It goes in cycles. Sometimes during a recession we see a jump in tech training as people are trained to do two jobs. In other recessions we've seen slumps as training is often cut from budgets early.

I had thought we'd see a big move to elearning. I have not seen it. Yes, some organizations are doing it for tech topics, but the move has not been nearly as dramatic as I and others had supposed it would be.

Part of the reason is cost: unless you are training a lot of people, the cost of maintaining a tech course is high. Even a Java course has to be updated on a regular basis to teach new libraries and such. If tech training elearning developers looked more at short modules instead of "courses" this would not be an issue. Unfortunately, if you look around you'll see more "buy our Java course" sites than "buy a brief module" sites. The vendors often see the market as training from scratch, not improving or enhancing people's existing skills. They have good reason to think that way because its made them money in the live ILT space.

This is changing and I have heard of some interesting new things in the modularized elearning world.

But, tech training is not really dying in my opinion. It is shrinking due to the economy (as is the broader training sector), and it is changing. Older topics like "how to use excel" are making way for newer topics like "how to edit video". In the US, many HS grands know the former (in many areas of the US basic word processing and spreadsheet use are 9th grade competencies), and some know the latter. One company I work with requires knowing and passing a test on MS Office skills before final hiring. Basic video making will likely supplement or supplant basic PowerPoint skills shortly.

"The times they are a-changing."

Hi Friend ,
I wrote to the ASTD person who designed the State of the Industry Report and asked the reason for not including structured OJT. It turned out the person was not familiar with it!! Amazing. The person indicated that it would be considered in the next survey, but of course it still has not been included.