By now you’ve all heard it. Heck by now you have experienced it. I’m talking about the explosion of the digital universe. IDC and EMC have been measuring the size of the Digital Universe for a few years now. This year’s study confirms our digital universe – or all the information that is available to us in a digital format – is growing even faster than we thought. In fact they expect it to grow 44 times what it is now in the next ten years.

This means we have more content available at our fingertips (literally!) than at any other time in history. For learning professionals, this should be a great thing right? We can just connect people to the Internet, where they will be able to find all the content they need.

Right?

The amount of content available is the solution and the problem

Time: Think about the last time you had to search for something you knew nothing about. For instance, right now I am very interested in learning about SOAP and REST because these technologies enable cloud applications. Problem with me: I have zero free time. At some point my itch to figure this out is going to overwhelm me, and I’ll sacrifice a few nights of sleep to learn the basics.

Where should I start looking for content? A google search for “soap rest cloud” looks promising, but returns 1,620,000 results. Just eyeballing the top results makes me think the articles will be too advanced for what I know now.  I don’t have time to sift through all of that, I just want to know the basics from a source I can trust to give solid technical content.

And are there really 1.620,000 pieces of content available? Probably not. From experience, I know many of the results will be reposts of one good blog post or web page, with some spam and non-relevant links mixed in. I have enough experience to be able to filter through most of the muck, but what if I was a complete novice?

Vocabulary: Every discipline has its own vocabulary. When you study a discipline its one of the first things you learn. Ohm’s law. The Negroponte switch. ADDIE. When you learn these terms, you have a reference for researching more about the terms, learning new things related to the discipline. If you are a total newbie, you may not know the vocabulary of the discipline. This limits how you search for information, and it may be a barrier to finding the digital content you need.

Search Engines: Many times search engines provide results in a chronological order. For example, I couldn’t find a good reference link for the Negroponte Switch, so I gave a Wikipedia link. The Wikipedia article is an orphan, which makes me question its relevance. But even thought I know what this term means, I couldn’t find an article that succinctly describes it. I learned about it in college 10 years ago, so my thought is maybe all of the articles I need are just to old to come up in the first 30 pages of Google results. My experience with the term helped me sift through the content provided, but if I was a total newbie would I have been able to do that?

So we have tons of content, we’ve all agreed on that. But can learners find content when they need it, especially can they find it at the time of a performance need? I’ll touch on that in my next post.

Every year, EMC sponsors an IDC study about the state of the expanding digital universe. My post about last year’s study is here. The data in this year’s study is just crazy!

For example:

• Last year, despite the global recession, the Digital Universe set a record. It grew by 62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes. A petabyte is a million gigabytes. Picture a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back.
• This year, the Digital Universe will grow almost as fast to 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes. (There’s a word we haven’t had to use until now.)
• 25  quintillion information containers – packets, files, images, records, signals – that the bits in the Digital Universe will be in by 2020.  (A quintillion is what comes after a quadrillion).

The press release for the study can be found here.

We have so much digital information that we are having to teach people new words just to describe the size of it! The study suggests we’ll need the things we’ll need just to deal with the quantity of data:

• Ways to add structure to unstructured data
• New storage and information management techniques
• More compliance tools
• Better security

Just who will manage all this information?

Of course that is where my interest lies. We know we’re facing such a huge increase in the amount of digital data, and we know the challenges we’ll have managing this tsunami of data. But do we have enough people with the skills that are going to be required to do manage the ginormous digital universe?

Let’s step back one step further – what are the skills required to manage and secure the information containers that make up the digital universe?

EMC Proven Professionals to the rescue!

My organization has played a role in this for a long time. The EMC Proven Professional program is designed to educate and train the folks who will be managing these information containers. Our educational program is role-based, which means our training is written with particular job duties in mind. Individuals can take a certification exam to verify what they learned in training, and become an EMC Proven Professional.

From this year’s Digital Universe study, I’d say we’re going to be busy evaluating if we need to adjust any of our training materials based on how job roles change to meet the needs to the expanding digital universe.

For my ed-tech friends, that is the E in ADDIE. I just had to say it! : )

Why should you care about this? All of the content you create – your videos, your pictures, your blog posts, the tweets that are part of #lrnchat, all of your data uploaded to a Ning network or to a Moodle instance, all of the comments your students make to message boards you set up for them to learn interactively, all of this adds to the digital universe.

If you want all that stuff to be available, affordable, and archived for the future, someone needs to be managing it. That’s what Proven Professionals do. If you are interested in getting Proven, check out this page. Or come and join us in the Proven Professional Community.

My next post will be about how the people responsible for managing all of this digital data actually feel about the Proven Professional program.

I’ve hinted that I have been doing some community building at work (I work for Education Services at EMC). Well, I can finally talk about it because the EMC Proven Professional Community has been launched! The Proven Community is part of a bigger community called ECN – EMC Community Network.

Obviously our community is for the over 30,000 folks who hold one of EMC’s Proven Professional certifications. The community is also for anyone interested in the program, or interested in discussing the issue of “industry readiness” – what skills will IT professionals need in order to meet the needs of the digital explosion? I know I didn’t learn about storage technologies in college. How are people picking up these skills?

This is your official invite to come check out the community. Anyone can access it, but if you want to participate you need to register. If you are Proven, come introduce yourself. Or maybe you’re interested in one of these topics:

• What’s the value of an IT Certification in a down economy?
• How are you contributing to the digital explosion?
• Is there a need to focus on Information Management education? I started this thread based on one of my blog posts about this sort of education.

I’m sure as EMC World gets closer, we’ll start having more conversations about that. So come join the community!