Technology is moving rapidly – so how do we keep up?
CEOs complain about the lack of employee’s essential skills
According to PwC’s 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey, four out of five CEOs complain about their employees lack of essential skills and identified this factor as a threat to growth. The problem has escalated over the past five years and is raised consistently across all regions: CEOs in Japan and Central/Eastern Europe are most worried (95% and 89%, respectively), whereas those in Italy (55%) and Turkey (45%) are the least anxious about it.
The skills shortage can restrict growth chiefly because it stifles innovation and raises workforce costs. It’s understandable that organizations are concentrating on reskilling. Given the right context, people can be highly adaptable, and an organization’s ability to harness that adaptability will be critical as the world of work evolves.
Employees are willing to learn
The good news is that employees are more than willing to reskill and upskill. According to a PwC global survey of more than 12,000 workers, employees are happy to spend two days per month on training to upgrade their digital skills. Digital skills have a short shelf life, so learning will need to be continuous and woven into the organizational culture.
Skills mismatches have a direct impact on a nation’s GDP, tax revenues and social safety net bill.
So, the OECD Skills Outlook 2019 aims to understand how policies (in particular those that affect skills development and use), can shape the outcomes of digital transformation and translate into more equally shared benefits among and within countries’ populations.
The Economist reports that as automation, AI, and new job models reconfigure the business world, lifelong learning has become accepted as an economic imperative.
Development is important for employee happiness
This Harvard Business Review article says the fact that evolution has made us the ultimate learning machines, and the ultimate learning machines need a pinch of curiosity to help us take full advantage of this learning capacity because we are a neotenic species, born with an instinct to learn throughout our lives. So it makes sense that at work we are constantly looking for ways to do things better with the lifelong capacity to learn.
Training can be a powerful medium when there is proof that the root cause of the learning need is an undeveloped skill or a knowledge deficit. For those situations, Laszlo Bock in a recent HBR article, suggests that a well-designed program with customized content, relevant case material, skill building practice, and a final measurement of skill acquisition, works great.
Learning leader Ann Schulte, Chief Learning Officer at Procter & Gamble (P&G), explains in this Harvard Business Review article why learning is more important in 2019 than ever, and how the firm’s strategy reflects this: “At P&G, we believe that the ‘fastest learner wins’ because we see in uncertain and changing markets that experimentation, rapid-cycle feedback, and the ability to adapt are competitive imperatives — and all require learning. To help our people learn faster, we are disrupting how we manage learning and development to focus more on the immediate business context and personalized needs by providing easy access to information, performance support aids, and carefully curated training that is relevant and can be directly applied to work.”
This isn’t a time to sit back and wait for events to unfold. To be prepared for the future, we have to make learning a part of our everyday work.
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