When I talk about the future of L&D, I’m not talking about the next year or two. I’m also not talking about the next best thing in L&D, like social media or talent management.
I’m talking about the future, 5 years, 10 years and beyond. What will it look like? More importantly, what and who will we be training? We keep hearing that we need to train for future skills. How do you do train to something when you’re not exactly sure what that something is?
For a glimpse of what Andrew McAfee, an economist, thinks the workforce will look like. His TED talk is here. It is really worth the 14 minutes. It’s not just Andrew McAfee, listen to Sir Ken Robinson about his thoughts on what education needs to do in order to have people ready for the workforce. His TED talk can be found here. I’ve posted this one before.
The point is that as performance management professionals, learning and development professionals, OD professionals or whatever we call ourselves over the next several years, we have to have a prepared workforce to work with. This is going to mean that we need to start preparing people long before they enter the workforce. Read into this, we need to change the way the educational system works.
You need to look to whole brain research, Emotional Intelligence and Neuroscience on how research is now showing how we learn. It’s very different than we have previously thought. You also need to look at people who have gone through programs like Montessori, home schooling and un-schooling. The results are impressive and hard to argue with. You can find some names here.
Our education system needs to prepare students to become knowledge workers, creative thinkers and entrepreneurs. Currently, the system is set up to deal with the industrial age. We need to be prepared to train flex workers, thought leaders and entrepreneurs. This means an entirely different set of skills for students and for people in learning and development.
While mobile and gamification is a start, our skill set will need to evolve way past that, just as technology will need to evolve to support it.
As professionals we need to start to get involved in our educational system. It is going to be incumbent on business to work with schools. Schools need to change the way they teach. It’s the only way I can see us having a prepared workforce for whatever lies ahead. The changes need to begin long before we get to work with them in a corporate setting or as more likely as entrepreneurs or freelancers.
What do you think?!
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