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Tony Reddington

Managing Director

THRIVE Learning

Is Josh Bersin right? Will

the LXP overtake the LMS

market?

What rattles my cage? It's this ongoing,

incessant navel gazing we all seem so

obsessed with in this industry. We're stupidly

stuck on semantics

Recently I have been reading some thoughtprovoking, compelling articles by analysts

and industry thought-leaders. They focus on

the future of workplace learning: what it

means, where we're headed and how we're

going to get there. They're often well

researched and backed by data or tangible

evidence.

All signs point to some type of learning

ecosystem, with an evolved platform as its

lynchpin, or as Josh coined recently 'the

Learning Experience Platform': "The LXP

market exists because the paradigm of the

Learning Management System is out of date.

People no longer search course catalogs for

'courses' the way they used to, and we need

a way to train and learn 'in the flow of work'.

So, while the category is a product category,

it's also a category of systems designed with

a new philosophy: learning in the flow of

work."

Well heck, what should we call it?

Conversely, I have also read some ridiculous,

hyperbolic marketing bumf recently.

Antagonistic content designed to agitate, but

deeply lacking in compelling evidence or data

to suggest the author has done adequate

research about what they claim is their area of

expertise - the most recent being the

Learning Experience Platform.

Sadly, it doesn't matter that their articles are

mostly hype, because the latter group of

writers has done something really

magnificent: they've captured our inherent

desire to obsess over the minor,

inconsequential details in this industry.

Is it an LMS? Or an LXP? Well, you can't call it

an LXP because of this. But you can't call it an

LMS because of that. We're distracted and

forgotten the focus on the real, gargantuan

problem and onto language semantics.

Clever.

LMS? LXP? NGLE? WTF?

This isn't a new thing. Long have we

contested the semantics of specific words.

I specifically reference Don Taylor's 'learning'

definition article from last year as an exemplar.

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