The Three Top Learning Trends on Everyone's Mind

My wonderful plans to post from the ASTD 2007 International Conference failed under a crushing load of 9,000 attendees, 16 hours of booth expo, a few seminars, networking, discussing, and good Atlanta cuisine. So I have some serious catching-up to do on all kinds of thoughts - expect a small blitz of posts!

The conference was full. Lots of people, lots of energy. The seminar tracks covered all the expected heavy-hitters: talent management, leadership, ROI, performance improvement. On top of those, I noticed some interesting trends that were making their presence known.

• International learning and diversity were popular topics, and the international audience at the conference was heavy; I heard second-hand that 25% of the conference attendees were from outside the United States. The world is getting smaller, all companies and countries are becoming more global, and HR and training departments need to be able to reach them all.
• Generational changes were also a big topic, from the retirement of the baby boomers to the arrival of Generation Y. Disproportional retirements means that training needs for succession and leadership planning are huge, and the next generation's arrival means a need for lots of new ways to reach this fast-moving, majorly-technologically-connected group of people.
• Which leads to my personal favorite emerging trend: Web 2.0 and the impact of other new technologies. I have another post in mind about that and one of the seminars in particular that I attended, but in a nutshell: the "Web 2.0" focus on taking control of information out of the hands of the few and into the hands of danged-near everybody has huge implications for learning. This is one of the more buzzed-about topics I saw at the conference - although I didn't notice a lot of adoption of it yet on the show floor from companies. Which I guess is part of the whole point of letting the people on the front lines broadcast what they see and know as loudly as possible.

Any other attendees notice any other trends or new ideas that captured their interest?