The corporate learning revolution - are you educating the next generation of talent for the next generation of jobs?

We don't fully realise how current jobs will be impacted by mega-trends such as automation and the replacement of tasks via artificial intelligence. There is even some talk that we need to prepare for the worker-less workforce. It could even be possible that one day your CEO will be a bot.... After all, IBM Watson in the not too distant future will outperform radiologists and be able to diagnose disease.

The knowledge and abilities that we need to survive aren't those that are skills-based. They are about developing intra-preneurial skills and a full culture of ongoing learning that is not based on Jurassic principles about how people want to learn and what they need to learn to meet the demands of a future workplace that we cannot yet totally conceptualise.

And to add to our challenges, more than 40% of millennials leave organisations because they are not getting the professional development that they would like to have. And the cost of losing those employees is enormous: it costs between 100 - 200% of an annual salary to replace an employee if you factor in all the add-on expenses!

If we aren't thinking about these issues in a serious way, we risk blowing your HR and L and D budget on staff acquisition instead of working towards a more sustainable learning pathway - that could cost you a whole lot less and have the added bonus of building skills, growing talent and meeting the current and future learning needs of all team members.

Here are some practical and straightforward ways of getting started as you think about how you train and what you direct your budget towards:

1. Consider this: if you were to give a training voucher worth $500 to your team members or managers, would they spend it on anything that you have sitting on your current LMS? Would they spend it on the elearning that you are dishing up to them? Answer honestly and if the answer is no or a weak 'maybe', it's time to press the refresh button and move into new forms of learning that are more suited to the modern learner.
2. Your learners live in a mobile, digital world where they access information when they need it. They don't search a catalogue of courses that don't meet their needs immediately and they certainly don't wait around while long term plans are made for class-based learning. Please don't kid yourself in to believing that by spending most of your training budget on the top exec levels will eventually filter down in to the organisation. It's all about the spread of learning if you want to see meaningful changes.
3. The skills that need training are aimed at preparing all people, no matter which generation they belong to, for uncertainty and change. The competition for top talent is going to go through the roof and the skills in demand include being an adaptive, creative problem solver. This is something that can be trained and trained via innovative methodologies - and it's something that is often neglected in an overall training plan.
4. There is no excuse for not training your entire workforce on all things IT. We don't know what success will look like in 10 years' time. We do know it will be more automated and that advances in technology will happen exponentially: when you can describe a problem mechanically and precisely, it will eventually be done automatically. We cannot think of jobs of the past. The human frontier is innovation and entrepreneurship.
5. It’s the age of the ‘new collar’ worker. There is no more white or blue collar. Lifelong learning that include stackable credits and work experience in different projects and in varied project teams is the new currency. Broaden the way in which you conceptualise training so that it moves beyond the standard parameters of the classroom or clickety-click elearning programs.
6. Whether we have a large or small budget, there is no time for inertia and slow decision making. We have the courage to continue on the pathway of learning culture transformation. As Vishal Sikka of Infosys puts it:

“If you can’t fly, run. If you cannot run, then walk. If you cannot walk, then crawl. Just keep moving forward.”

MCI has a full consulting service to enable you to prepare your workforce for the challenges of tomorrow. Speak to us about how we can ensure that your panorama of learning meets current and future needs through engaging mobile learning options, strong content and a process for efficiently building towards successful outcomes.