The concept of "job for life", still prevalent in business just a few decades ago, no longer exists.

This places pressure on the individual who is faced with further pressures as the pace of business life increases and knowledge becomes quickly outmoded and supplanted by new information.

Individuals need to take more personal responsibility for the learning they take away from training programs and organizations need to align their choice of training with it's strategic objectives. 

Without a more rigorous identification of what is expected from the training, there is no longer any guarantee that the training will translate into business success.  There is also a need to identify 'training' in the scheme of a wider system of 'learning' as the current narrow definition of training does not do justice to the wide array of new skills and perspectives that individuals can develop and bring to the company.

In order to develop learning experiences that will maximize value for the individual's personal and professional development, and to meet their organization's strategic requirements, there will be a shift in learning towards a constructivist theory.  This holds that all knowledge is essentially personal knowledge - the learner is at the centre of the process, not the classroom, the lecturer, or the material they are learning from.

Training can no longer be merely a valuable thing to do for its own sake.  It must directly benefit the organization, improve the specific skills of the individual and create effective transferable skills for the individual, because their career step is likely to be with a different organization than their current one.

Adapted from Shape The Agenda, "Learning 2.0"