The Crystal Ball - Beyond Workforce Planning

Sometimes I look at my kids while they toil away at learning seemingly empty facts and wonder, just with a small twinge, what exactly they are preparing for.  I learn about standardized tests in the same magazines that tell me about our society’s skill gaps and I fret a bit about the skill chasm that is unfolding before us. 

Have you heard about the homeschooling movement that is taking over the US to the tune of 1.8 million students?  About the 4.9 million kids in private schools?  About the 5.8 million manufacturing jobs US workers have lost since 1998? Consider this:  millions of people feel that our children are being ill prepared for a future where jobs, once stable and predictable, have become hubs for innovation and by extension, unpredictability.  Flip through a job posting site and try to predict what each job will look like in 20 years - either it won’t exist, will be radically altered, or you can’t even wager a guess at what it will look like.  

Succession and workforce planning may appear on the surface as a boring financial planning activity, a banal metrics exercise, perhaps like a secret compendium of names; but, I challenge you to find a single one of these plans that considers the category “20+ years”.  We spend so much time and money filling our immediate pipeline, but what about our pipeline for 20 years down the road?  By ignoring this big question we are implicitly trusting that the future skills needed are those being grown.  

Our future prosperity depends on our future employees – who right now are just learning about earth science and pre-algebra.  The development of these future employees, upon whom we will all depend, can’t be the sole responsibility of an educational system which 6.7 million children are not even a part of.   We seem to recognize our corporate and social responsibility to be stewards of our collective physical environment, but largely ignore our equal or, I would posit, even weightier responsibility to be stewards of our future generation of talent.

 I know that hundreds of programs exist in small pockets to raise technology skill levels, to improve career readiness, and to impart technical skills and innovative thinking to the next generation.  But too few of us see it as part of our imperative to focus on this long range development planning.  I scanned thousands of “talent management” and “corporate stewardship” job descriptions and nowhere did I find a single one that had even a bullet about long range talent planning. 

Today we are using the age old “close your eyes and the monster will go away” method of long range human capital planning.  Instead, we should be devoting real time - investing in education advocacy, bringing together corporate minds to impact and define school curricula, creating after school clubs and activities that open minds to critical thinking and innovation.  We should be pinpointing skills and targeting talent.  And above all, we should be embedding this long range thinking into our talent and social responsibility work.  

 Like everything, only when we dedicate resources and organized thinking to a problem can we arrive at a solution.  This is a problem impacting our very sustainability - as organizations, even as a society.  Together, let’s spend a few minutes on it.