Problem Witnessed:
We have witnessed People lose their jobs and savings. Even if people have kept their jobs, they have experienced extra expenses related to the pandemic—including purchasing the technology to work from home—or lost hours. Many employees are feeling low morale and are uncertain about their job stability.

Changing Landscape:
In 2021, employees will be more motivated to develop their skill sets through training to prepare for potentially being on the job market or making themselves invaluable to their current company. Employers will want to use training for their own purposes. They will want to increase morale—perhaps offering wellness training, or creating reassuring transparency by educating employees about the company’s financial future.

Another area, employers might dip their toes into is, training employees on financial planning strategies. People who have been hit by what happened will be motivated to attempt to shape their finances to protect themselves from future emergencies. Companies will be willing to help if it means being able to help address employee anxiety.

Problem Witnessed:
Companies that have been hit by the pandemic are tightening their belts a few notches. This means that they will be less willing to spend on eLearning.

Changing Landscape:
Newer and more expensive technologies like VR and AR will go out the window in favor of less expensive, tried-and-true, easily scalable eLearning styles, such as LMS modules and microlearning. They will also prefer methods of eLearning that require smaller teams to successfully carry out, and look for ways to automate processes.

Companies will prefer to reuse and rearrange content over creating new and shiny custom courses. Custom courses can be expensive, so they will be less likely to request them in the future. This might, in turn, motivate eLearning companies to bolster their off-the-shelf eLearning content offerings.

Analytics has already been an important emerging trend for years but it will become even more important when higher-ups are analyzing the cost-benefit of every program in order to determine where they can save money.

Problem Witnessed:
Companies have had employees working from home for a few months now, and in some sense, employees have adjusted. However, companies shifted to remote work extremely quickly, without creating any strategies for doing so—or if they had a strategy, it was designed to address the emergency rather than create a sustainable work-from-home environment.

Since so many employees will wish to work from home even after the pandemic is over, some companies will never return to the office at all. They’re in this for the long haul, so they may dedicate some time to creating sustainable work-from-home policies. They may also have recommendations for their employees to be able to work from home in a sustainable, healthy way. This information will likely be distributed via eLearning. For example, many employee health and wellness programs may be transferred from in-person to the eLearning Solution/LMS.

Changing Landscape:
Companies will want to continue to find new ways to support their employees from afar, and training will be an obvious and effective way to do it. In response, eLearning companies will get creative about what kinds of training offerings will make a difference in employees’ remote work lives.

Problem Witnessed:
No one knows what the future looks like right now, or how soon the pandemic will be over. Companies will be developing strategies to weather whatever the world and the economy throw their way.

Changing Landscape:
One strategy that many companies may find themselves implementing is emphasizing cross-training in employees. Cross-training helps make companies more adaptable by being able to adjust quickly to layoffs and employee turnover. For example, if there is only one person on the team who knows how to work a particular software program, it will make it difficult for that team to adapt if that person leaves. Companies will be interested in training types that are adaptable to many different situations, such as virtual learning and mobile learning.

eLearning contracts might become shorter—companies might be less willing to commit to paying consultants and third parties for more than a couple of years in case big changes occur and the company has to change tracks with their training strategy.