Standards, tools and techniques for competency and skills based learning content personalisation are emerging – which is just as well because they can help organisations perform better in the increasingly competitive global economy. This is the message that Giunti Labs (www.giuntilabs.com) is outlining at this year’s Online Educa conference and exhibition, being held in Berlin from 2^nd to 4^th December. Online Educa Berlin (http://www.online-educa.com/the-conference), the largest global e-learning conference for the corporate, education and public service sectors, attracts experts in the vanguard of technology-enhanced learning from around the world.

According to Giunti Labs’ CEO, Fabrizio Cardinali, who will give a presentation at the Online Educa conference, leading organisations are now reshaping their learning departments, re-tooling them towards systems and technologies that empower higher degrees of learning personalisation and customisation. These systems and technologies are based on students’ and employees’ skills, competencies and portfolios as well as the delivery media available. Such systems and technologies make organisations better suited to empower their evolving workforces and their increasing re-skilling and performance support needs.

As members of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG), Giunti Labs will also attend ELIG’s workshop at the Online Educa conference, which is being held on 2^nd December from 2pm to 6pm. This workshop brings together key stakeholders to outline the next moves towards achieving a ‘learning society’. These key stakeholders include policy makers, corporate learning officers, learning industry experts and representatives from the education world. Details of this workshop can be accessed from the ELIG website (www.elig.org).

Comment: Even taking account of any ‘supplier hype’, there seems to be a growing trend towards, on the one hand, using rapid e-learning authoring tools to turn out performance support tools fairly quickly and, on the other hand, increasingly sophisticated e-learning applications. These applications are beginning to take account of the learner’s existing skills and competencies, learning preferences and needs, access to delivery mechanisms and the context in which the learning is required. It’s all a far cry from the ‘e-learning 1.0’ of some 15 years ago – when it was still ‘computer based training’.