Learning, Games, Training and Generation Y

I had an amazing opportunity to attend the "Kaplan Eduneering Knowledge Exchange" event hosted at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco over the past 3 days.

Initially, I was attending due to my company being a customer of theirs, and in order to gain some insight into the nature of the system we use and some of the other opportunities where it could be applied in our enterprise.

The event was fantastic, Eduneering was an amazing host and everyone there was absolutely sharp as a tack and filled with insight. It was a rather small venue too, maybe 30 people max, but it was a very productive and idea-spawning event.

In addition to the standard presentations on the application of their product across a wide variety of industries, there were two guest speakers that were given the opportunity to present. I found these speakers absolutely enthralling.

The first speaker was Dr. Karl Kapp, a scholar and expert in the "convergence of learning, technology, and business operations" - as taken from his above-linked blog. He was a captivating presenter and the concepts he touched on were things that have happened in my own life that I can empirically say were true statements. He touched on the effectiveness of web-based learning, as well as learning tied to games and activities that achieve far better competency results than standard lecture-driven courses. An example from my own life that I mailed him about after the event was my heavy interest in "text-based" roleplaying games when I was younger. These games forced me to read and type very fast in order to respond to events that were happening with my character. Due to years of that at a very young age, today I read at over 650WPM and type at 120+WPM. Granted, I'm not escaping from sewer rats or going on quests - I'm actually reading and writing business documents.

The second speaker was Nadira Hira, a journalist for Fortune Magazine. She gave another absolutely invigorating presentation on the impact of Generation Y in today's workforce. Being a card-carrying member of Generation Y, her talk was very relevant to my experiences as well. She was an energetic speaker, very enthusiastic and willing to discuss her ideas. I found a lot of the things she said to be very applicable to my day-to-day experiences and actually framed some background on the general background that a lot of my older-generation coworkers originated from.

One of the main points that she spoke about was the line between work and life with Generation Y is fairly blurred, and those of us in the aforementioned generation want where we work to be synonymous with the morals and values we hold in our everyday lives. Going to work and repetitively doing something from 9 to 5 for a company that I don't even know what they do is something that rates in the "negative interest" column. I'm passionate about where I work and from this passion spawns loyalty. I could absolutely join a temp agency and make a magnitude more money than where I work now for money's sake, but my attachment to the organization outweighs this - and the feeling that I am able to impact the organization and shape ways of doing things / methodologies is a reward that can't be monetarily measured.

Anyhow, it was a great event, and like I said the Kaplan Eduneering staff were amazing hosts and very good people. I certainly got much more than I expected.