The professional development landscape has taken a bit of a seismic shift in the past 12 months, albeit one that was already on the horizon. The complete switch from in-person classroom training to remote solutions happened almost instantly in early 2020, and, for the most part, appears to be here to stay. But that’s only part of the story. At NAFEMS, we’ve been running online e-learning classes since 2009, and have trained almost 10,000 people in that period. We’ve also seen a growing need for more specific training courses, to enable students to focus on a particular area of a particular topic, and for this to be part of a wider course program. Perhaps attention-spans are getting shorter and budgets are getting tighter, but there no longer seems to be a “one- size fits all” training solution for the engineering analysis community.

We asked a few of our tutors for their thoughts on what’s next for training in general, and how they see the shifts in both delivery methods and content developing in the future.