According to McKinsey and IDC, knowledge workers spend on average 19% of their working time - about a day a week - just looking for information, not actually doing productive work. That’s staggering for a few reasons, not least of which is the math. Let’s take a company with 100 employees who each earn an average salary of 80K per year. If they all spend a day a week searching for information, with mixed results of finding what they’re looking for, that’s $1.6M a year in lost productivity, for that company alone. Employees could have been doing higher value work. And take this real-life example: a company founder who was known to spend half days looking for documents in corporate systems to share with new employees, only to come up empty handed. What was even more frustrating: he wrote those documents so he knew they were there!

Having all the right people on your Customer Education (CE) team can make it much easier to produce the content your customers need to be successful. As a CE leader, you want to create a high-performing team, but it can be hard to find and retain CE professionals in a highly competitive world.

“The days of monolithic five-day courses are gone and have been replaced with training subscriptions, serving up modular, subject matter expert created and curated content with personalized and adaptive learning paths." - Dirk Braune, CEdMA Programs Trustee and Director Education Offering Design and Development at BMC Software GmbH

SprIng is in the air. It’s finally April (although still VERY chilly wayyyy up north in Ottawa, Canada with a “feels like” -18C this morning, but the birds are singing, and the sun is out!).

Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the field of Customer Education. As I launched the CELab (Customer Education Lab) podcast with Dave Derington, and authored my book, Customer Education: Why Smart Companies Profit by Making Customers Smarter, I kept coming back to a central question: What does it take for someone to become successful in the field of Customer Education?

Are you wondering where our industry is headed?

We reached out to the leaders of CEdMA to find out what's in store for you and your teams this year.  Below are Customer Education trends, best practices, and predictions for 2019, direct from the CEdMA Executive Council and Board . 

Companies are always looking for ways to increase productivity, efficiency, and performance. Most turn to new technology to accomplish that, however the way you introduce the technology to the organization can have a big impact on its success. There's a lot of pressure to find the 'right' technology and integrate it in a timely manner to the organization. Done incorrectly, it can be disastrous for those who use it and the organization as a whole.