Navigating the 'digital roof': Benefits, challenges for learning

Boundaries between family, life, play, and work blur: whitepaper

Navigating the 'digital roof': Benefits, challenges for learning

Boundaries between family, life, play, and work have become a blur as these activities blend under a unified digital environment that can both benefit and challenge employers.

A whitepaper from SAP Insights coined this new space as a "digital roof."

According to the paper, this digital roof has a significant impact on organisations, particularly on learning.

Platforms such as LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok have emerged under the digital roof to boost the growth in user-generated learning content.

"A bottom-up, collaborative learning approach, in which everyone at a company can play a role in course creation, provides a decentralised and democratised way to develop and distribute learning content," the paper said.

"The digital roof gives us the Netflix of learning — personalised, entertaining, on-demand."

Digital roof's impact on learning

This expansion in user-generated learning content has also allowed internal and external workers to take ownership of their development, according to the paper.

"For example, coaching and leadership development have usually been available only at the upper echelons of an organisation, due to the time- and labour-intensive nature of this type of training," the report said.

"Now apps like BetterUp can help democratise those opportunities by matching individuals with mentors or coaches in a highly personalised and contextually relevant way."

In a way, the report noted that the digital roof has broadened leadership development to cover all levels of the organisation.

"People with leadership potential can be spotted earlier in their careers and developed at a lower cost," the paper said. "For L&D departments, this means better ROI on programme investments."

The challenge under the digital roof, according to the paper, is tracking what employees are doing and ensuring that the content they consume is "relevant and correct."

"One way to reduce the noise is proactively identifying content that serves both the needs of employees and the learning goals of the organisation," the paper said.

The digital roof is just one of the six drivers of the future of corporate learning as identified by SAP Insights. Read more about the other drivers here.