This year, WOLCE's 10th anniversary sees a change of name, reflecting a change to encompass all channels of professional learning: it's now the World of Learning Conference and Exhibition. The event comprises a two-day conference and exhibition with an evening Gala Dinner Ceremony (after dinner speech by England Rugby Captain, Will Carling), for this year’s WOLCE awards.

This year’s conference consists of four themed development tracks; e-learning, blended learning, best practise in open and distance learning and face-to-face learning. The conference, spread over two days will cover all these areas and will be of interest to any professional training practitioner.

This year’s opening address will be made by Dave Jedrziewski, Director of Leadership and Management Development, Dell Computer Corporation, USA, who will cover the organisational changes that are required to initiate and deliver successful training programmes: "Currently at Dell we are moving to a leadership based training and development organisation to attain our training results in the right way. By instituting the ethos that “one manages things and one leads people” we are changing the focus of our training and development to one which allies itself to our business needs and uses whatever delivery means necessary to gain results. We have, however, taken the ego out of the training field by allowing employees to have an increased sense of ownership over their training as long as it fits with their clearly developed career mapping. The results of these changes are a reduced training spend but also with higher employee morale and higher productivity."

This year’s keynote address will be given by Mark Frank, Principal, IBM Learning Services. Frank will be assessing the penetration of new training technologies and whether employees welcome these technological changes. You can read his preview here.

One major theme at WOLCE theme is that no one delivery method suits all and employees are increasingly being empowered to take responsibility for their own learning and preferred learning methods as conference speaker Karen Velasco, Training and Development Manager at Centrica states: "Distance learning or “right time, right place” learning is not a panacea for all learning and there are many other forms of learning including plain old reading. It is often up to the training department to show employees the different ways one can learn."

Exhibitors at WOLCE will include Traineasy, Macromedia, Balance Learning, We teach you, and the sponsors of WOLCE, Learndirect.

For more information and pre-registration here.