Organizations are not using technology in ways that match with how we think, work, and learn. The learning and development (L&D) function is focused on limited options, when there’s so much more they could be doing. On the other hand, people are using mobile devices in ways that are natural, ways that augment their ability to do. The intersection here is the opportunity that mobile provides.

For most organizations, starting to explore adding mobile to an organizational learning strategy can be confusing. Some organizations see mobile learning as nothing more than HTML5. Some instructional designers think mobile learning is a concern only for developers. Still other organizations think mobile is nothing more than a different publishing option from an authoring tool. It’s only when you start walking down the path that you realize just how wrong those assumptions, and countless others, truly are.

Today more people have mobile access than have safe drinking water and electricity. There are now as many mobile subscribers as there are people on Earth. Gartner predicted that there will be close to 1 billion smartphones sold in 2013. Despite the rapid consumer adoption of ever-advancing mobile technologies, many organizations still struggle with adding mobile to their learning strategy. As learning professionals, we will have to adopt new strategies and learn new skills in order to support workers in an increasingly mobile-first world.

According to ASTD Research, the most common forms of training across all industries are management and supervisory. These also represent a large percentage of training budgets in many organizations. Finding ways to address these training needs in a cost-effective way is critical, as is the need to integrate the social aspect that will unlock knowledge and share personal experience.

Online students and faculty are demanding mobile access to their online courses and institutional resources. Focus groups with our students and faculty have shown that mobile skins for the LMS, student portal, and library are not enough to satisfy mobile users.

Mobile computing continues to explode as consumers’ adoption rate of mobile devices increases significantly. How do we create and implement a strategy to capitalize on this and other new and emerging technology platforms? Many organizations are interested in walking this path, but they struggle with knowing how to get started. Knowing what the audience wants, whether to build or buy, and how to fund the project are just a few of the strategic questions that organizations face.

Nonprofit organizations often have many thousands of volunteers. While mobile learning and performance support have a great deal of potential, they also come with some hurdles. Most nonprofits shy away from digital engagement because of the need for huge amounts of dynamic content and the requirement for volunteers to bring their own devices.

Mobile policy doesn’t sound like an exciting topic, but it’s an essential component to a mobile learning strategy. You can have jaw-droppingly cool apps, context-sensitivity, video, alternate reality games, or all of the above, but you’ll end up failing if you’re not on top of your mobile policy. Quite simply, policy is strategy, and without strategy, you’re just stumbling around in the dark.

While most organization see mLearning as something new, it’s actualy been in existsnece in some form for well over a decade. Just as mobile technology has advanced and evolved during that time, so to have the strategies we use to leverge these technologues for learning and performance. Understanding where we have been, and the lessons we learned getting to this point, will help better prepare us for the continued evolution of mLearning in the future.

The widespread adoption of mobile devices has created many opportunities to enhance learning programs, but it has also brought new challenges. 20th Century Fox, a leader in the film, television, and entertainment industry, was able to successfully meet those challenges in its combined online and offline learning solution for managing courseware and critical training data through mobile devices for its employees worldwide.

Have you ever tested spaghetti to see if it’s cooked by throwing it against a wall? That’s how too many organizations now approach their training programs—throwing standalone eLearning or face-to-face courses at their staff, hoping the learning will stick. There are things we can do to increase the odds of making learning stick by augmenting standalone courses. Many of these strategies are easy to implement and are very suited to mLearning approaches, giving us a whole new set of tools to improve the effectiveness of learning events.

Determining if and how mLearning fits into a learning strategy is complicated. The temptation is to adopt mLearning because it’s the latest and greatest panacea to solve all learning woes. Much like eLearning was positioned as displacing classroom learning at its height, so mLearning is viewed by many as the golden child. Learning professionals also face the pressure of having to establish return on investment for an unproven strategy with significant up-front investments.

In order to develop a learning strategy that responds to the rapidly evolving world, learning professionals need to look at the business environment differently. On the one hand, the traditional business needs of the organization will continue to be critical and must be served. On the other hand, the next generation of learning strategies must place equal importance on the actual performance and learning needs of employees. Future learning strategies will look different, be delivered differently, and be led by a new breed of learning professional.

One of TELUS’ key goals is to have a majority of its workforce work in a flexible mobile work environment. Learning strategies had to adapt to this goal. Learning could no longer simply be available on one’s laptop or in a face-to-face class. Our learning strategy had to be enhanced and updated to accommodate our growing mobile workforce.

A common business problem is that employees want to advance their career, but they often build a plan that is focused on promotions. They want to move up but do not consider lateral moves or moves outside their profession or outside their function. Beyond that, employees need the knowledge, tools, and resources to prepare for career change opportunities. Cisco has addressed this problem by constructing a mobile solution that enables employees to explore careers based on a career lattice approach.

It hasn’t been that long since we only worried about testing online training lessons on Internet Explorer and Netscape. Those days are long gone. Today we face a myriad of testing challenges due to the vast number of devices and operating systems that are being used by our learners. Developing and testing our applications to ensure that they will work for everyone is an increasingly challenging part of an organizational learning strategy.

Learning is often built on technology, taking place in different forms and locations such as eLearning, mLearning, and social media. What if learning, resources, mentorship, and performance support strategies could all be found in one place, when your employees needed them? That is the ideal scenario, and one that would provide specific measurements for observable data outcomes.