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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Learning Management System is out of date.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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