Digital Disruption...How Different is it This Time?
Today, it’s hard to view LinkedIn or read virtually any industry publication without coming across some take on digital disruption/transformation and the associated workforce reskilling/upskilling challenges.
As a learning industry professional for many years, the reskilling/upskilling conversation is not new to me. As a member of the workforce for many years, the impact of technology on the workforce and the associated change, is certainly not new to me either. This persistent focus on reskilling and upskilling has me asking…Hasn’t each workforce generation experienced their own disruptions…or is the pace of change and technological innovation just so disruptive today that it truly is different?
Putting this in my personal context, when I entered the workforce, we had no PCs, no cell phones/smartphones…no internet…on the technology front, “behind the firewall” became “on-premise” became ASP became SaaS became the Cloud…Programming has gone from machine, to assembly to object to visual to modular…simulation became virtual became virtual reality…TQM, TQL, Kaizen, ISO, Six Sigma…CMM became CMMI...seemingly everything has now become “Agile”…my submarine was able to navigate and fire nuclear weapons with less computing power and much less sophisticated navigation capabilities than my smartphone…AI and machine learning have gone from science fiction to ubiquitous …
All of these had major workforce and workplace implications and somehow, using the learning and support tools of the day, the workforce continually reskilled and upskilled to keep pace with the evolving technology. Through it all, every workforce generation has had leaders who embraced and led the changes and laggards who were left behind by the changes. In fact, many of the leaders who embraced change in the past are the ones who have taken us to the dynamic state of technological disruption that we live with today.
While technology evolution is unquestionably driving disruption across industries at an unprecedented pace, I’d argue that the pace of disruption is creating growing segments of the workforce that regard change and disruption as business as usual. Consequently, these segments of the workforce embrace change and welcome it because in change there is opportunity. In parallel, the same technological tsunami that is driving disruption across industries is also driving profound advances in learning and performance improvement technologies, tools, resources, business models, and approaches. While the imperative to learn and learn quickly may be more pronounced than ever before, the tools of learning are also advancing at an ever accelerating rate – today it’s easier to learn pretty much anything you want to know than it’s ever been before – especially if one is able to readily access and apply the most relevant and applicable tools of knowledge learning at or near the moment of need.
In summary, there has never been a better time to be in the learning and human performance industry and I’m excited by the human performance disruptions this industry will continue to create. I’ll leave you with a question…Is your organization doing enough to bring use the learning and performance tools of THIS day into your workforce at the pace needed to drive organizational performance at scale?