Consider this. Netflix was born in 1997 when the youngest millennials were about a year old and the oldest were about fifteen. YouTube emerged eight years later and four years later, Uber drove on to the world scene. In other words, the millennial generation has grown up on choice and technology. They like to be in control of what they watch, how they commute, and how they prefer to be entertained. Technology is an integral part of their daily lives. With the advent of the smart phone in 2000, they also have to deal with shorter attention spans and the need to be constantly connected.

Today, millennials make up 35% of the American workforce making them the largest generation in the U.S. labor force, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. Yet, when they enter the workforce, many of them have to contend with traditional methods of training which may be a tedious instructor-led session or a boring page-turner e-learning session. Most millennial learners tend to disconnect and tune out in such situations.

Modern L&D organizations must realize that corporate learners now have choices. We need to look at them as consumers rather than “diktat-driven” employees. At NIIT, we have learned many lessons from B2C education to move our approach from top-down learning to a more democratized, consumer-driven learning strategy. We bring lessons and tools from consumer marketing with data and analytics to engage with the learner during their entire learning journey in an ultra-personalized manner.