Lessons from Davos’17: Learnability as Visionary CEO’s Key Metric

I’ve just returned from Davos, where the Future of Jobs and the top 15 skills required in the next 15 years, was a heavily debated topic.  While it is fascinating to consider the exact skills the workforce of the future will require, I strongly believe that adaptability and learnability are the fundamental skills that will enable our workforce to succeed, regardless of any other essential skills.

The challenge for every organization is to stay ahead of the speed of change. Our ability to learn continuously and increase our Learnability is critical, particularly in times of rapid change.

“The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent,” wrote World Economic Forum chairman, Klaus Schwab, in his groundbreaking report, The Fourth Industrial Revolution.  This Fourth revolution, “...is disrupting almost every industry in every country.  And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.”

Every day, every CEO searches for a way to hedge against this uncertain, rapidly changing future. If they don’t, massive numbers of jobs—and possibly companies themselves—will simply cease to exist.

How can a CEO succeed in today’s competitive markets? How do they navigate the uncertainties in the future? By becoming smarter. By creating a culture of continuous learning.  A culture that pervades every level of a company, and inhabits the minds of all employees. The CEO that creates a culture of continuous learning will arm their business with the most resilient and innovative workforce.

The New Metric: Learnability Score

We are already familiar with the continuous education (CE) that doctors, lawyers, certified public accountants, investment advisors, and insurance agents undertake.  For decades, professions like these have required people to engage in a minimum of 20-50 hours of continual education (CE) or continuous learning (CL) per year—the amount of time often determined by the state.

In recent years, associations for these industries have started to include non-formal learning, such as micro-learning, in the fold. Take, for example, the American Institute of CPAs, which is doing brilliant things with its Future of Learning initiative.  The AICPA recognized that their industry must be better able to adapt and evolve in their thinking and innovation. The solution involved creating, “a profession-wide global learning vision that’s focused on lifelong learning and competency.”

Today, it’s not only accountants who need to be one step ahead of the rate of change. The speed and complexity of change in business and technology is growing at such a curve that business and engineering professionals need CE/CL as much, if not more, than their CPA, doctor, or lawyer counterparts.

How can a CEO future-proof their business? Arm their people with the knowledge and skills to rapidly build the next innovation in their industry and enter new markets.  The CEO does this by making CE/CL mandatory and accessible. It is critical to weave an expectation for learning into the very fabric of company’s culture.

An Emerging Trend for Visionary CEOs

We’re already seeing this focus on learning emerge in Corporate America.  IBM has introduced a mandatory 40 hours of CE a year for all employees.  GE and its visionary CIO, Jim Fowler, has instituted a necessary 20 hours of technical learning for all IT and tech employees.  AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, has set up the expectation that all employees learn new skills, as reported by the New York Times earlier this year.

I had shared my perspective in Davos about disruption and importance of learnability which was well-received with Fortune 500 CEO's. I will share the summary in a quote below:  

“In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Learned will be disrupted by the Learner. We are focused on building Learnability as the core skill set for the future workforce.” -Karl Mehta

Here, at EdCast, we’ve initiated a mandatory 52 hours per year for all EdCasters to continuously challenge them to improve their Learnability. This works out to four hours per month, one hour per week, or 10-15 minutes per day. (We’re making sure that people do a minimum of four hours per month to avoid procrastination setting in and attempts to cram all 50 hours into the final month).

EdCast specifically requires that 50% of learning be related to the EdCaster’s role and skills/competencies in order to keep them performing as an A+ player. The other 50% can be aspirational: anything that takes someone a step further in their career.

We’re using our own EdCast platform, with its AI-driven curation engine, to locate the very best content available. Along with our formal content providers, we are bringing that content to every platform our employees use—so that learning can happen anywhere, with a mere flick of a thumb on a smartphone.

And this is what a visionary CEO would be smart to do: make learning consumable.  Make learning informal, fun, bite-sized, mobile-first, contextual, intelligent in recommendations, and easy to use.

We’ve only just begun our journey here at EdCast, so I’ll report back with our collective experiences.  But I can already tell you that it will be a journey that unleashes new possibilities with every turn. Like those visionary minds at IBM and GE, we truly believe that by investing in the collective learning of our people, we are investing in an agile and innovative future.