Page 78 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

Cultural business models on the Internet78transformation of society and culture is causing information to exist almost ubiquitously ina considerable variety of different media. Onthe other, interacting dynamically with thisfirst factor, the ideas that underlie processessuch as the building of the European Higher Education Area are increasingly calling for a type of student-centred learning. The consequenceof both factors is that it is becoming more and more important for people to be responsible for their own learning, as knowledge is no longer centralised solely in educational institutions, and for these institutions to promote autonomous learning to a greater extent. Therefore, the new generations of professionals will increasingly have to direct their own processes of acquiring skills – especially in the digital field, which is evolving more significantly than in other sectors. Technology does not progress at a linear pace but exponentially and, therefore, however much an organisation invests in training its profes- sionals, it is very unlikely to succeed in keeping up with this dizzy pace, especially because the training processes in organisations are sometimes slow, and because they are generally based on well-established knowledge – i.e. content that is already more part of the past than of the present or future.In the new learning model, companies must facilitate their professionals’ self-learning.Self-directed learning refers to the ability to take responsibility for the learning process by setting goals, planning them in time and space, locating the right materials, self-assessment, the ability toseek help from the right people on a particular matter, the capacity for critical thought and the ability to find internal self-motivation resources (Damian, A. C. & Georgescu, M., 2014).A study by Karakas and Manisaligil (2012) identifies five transformations which are chang- ing the landscape of learning in the digital age: virtual collaboration, technological convergence, global connectivity, online communitiesand digital creativity. These five changes are becoming recommendations for enabling human resources departments to facilitate self-directed learning in their organisations. It may be deduced from this study that we are witnessinga shift in the centre of gravity of in-company training, in which designing and organising courses is no longer the sole concern, towardsa model in which it is essential to facilitate professionals’ self-learning.Searching for and managing informationThe amount of information generated in the world is overwhelming. Gathering data from various sources, Domo.com (2013) providesa comprehensive set of computer graphics on this phenomenon. To cite a few examples, every minute WordPress users publish 347 posts, 571 new websites are created and 48 hours of video recordings are uploaded on YouTube. During that same minute, Google receives more than 2,000,000 search commands and Apple nearly 50,000 application download requests. Far from growing or becoming more systemised, this huge repository of knowledge called the Internet is calling for professionals to be increasingly skilledThe digital competencies of organisations: the challenge of digitally transforming talent