Jay Cross: Profiles in Knowledge

3 min readSep 12, 2018

Originally published on January 29, 2018

This article is the seventh in the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management and the third on those who are no longer with us. Jay Cross was born on July 5, 1944 and died on November 6, 2015. He popularized the term “e-learning” and championed the cause of informal learning in business settings.

Profiles

My calling is to make people happy. Millions of people. Particularly people in the rat race we call business. They deserve more fulfilling, satisfied lives. My philosophies on the power of informal learning, net-work, and emotional business are fundamentally changing the world of learning in organizations. I was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web.

The pace of time is speeding up. One of your minutes sees more progress in the world than one of your grandmother’s hours. And the pace is accelerating. I ponder such things at the Internet Time Lab in Berkeley. After all, time is all we have.

Content

When the job environment changed but slowly, corporate learning involved acquiring the skills and know-how to do the job. Now corporate learning means keeping up with the new things you need to know to do the job. Maybe daily. The traditional barriers separating training, development, knowledge management, performance support, informal learning, mentoring, and knowing the latest news have become obstacles to performance. They are all one thing, for one purpose, and that’s performance.