New Year, New Goals
2021 was a year that went by very quickly, from the uncertainty of 2020 to a more stable, streamlined, remote workflow that allowed us to work on and finish quite a large number of projects. Pathways was also acquired by Pluribus Technologies, which will give a much bigger platform to expand our client base and geographic reach.
From a personal point of view, I also accomplished a few goals, the most important of which is the fact that I studied and received a certification in Cybersecurity at the University of Toronto, which definitely helped me understand the gaps in this field that we can experience at Pathways and how to fill those gaps. It was certainly a fast paced year, much more so than 2020, but it was equally productive and rewarding.
For this new year, there are several goals, both at a company level and a personal level. For Pathways, we continue to develop Virtual Reality modules, which is a technology that is slowly picking up among our clients, I believe because given the remote nature of the majority of jobs at this moment, is something that can be exploited in favour of learners, mainly presenting something much more interactive. Not that VR will instantly replace standard eLearning, but it’s nice to see this technology slowly being adopted by our clients.
On a personal level, something interesting is also happening, as I embark in the journey of studying a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence. At first, it might not seem related to eLearning, but actually one of the things that motivated me to focus on this field, is the fact that AI can improve the training processes for both trainers and trainees. How so? Well, especially for companies with a large number of different roles and training available, it makes sense that this training is automatically tailored and rolled out to learners taking into account individual skills and performance, so no one training path (unless specified) will be 100% identical among all learners in a company, I believe training paths should focus on highlighting and boosting the skills that each employee has and needs to be more successful at their jobs, while at the same time reinforcing topics that are probably not at the core of a specific job, but that is good to have in case employees need to unexpectedly perform tasks that aren’t accounted for in their main responsibilities.
