The world of work, and therefore the world of talent development, is going through a great sea change. We can’t predict exactly how things will change, but we can peer through the fog and discern the outlines of some key features.
Knowledge will increasingly be the basis of sustainable competitive advantage. The talent development challenge is to help knowledge workers develop and adapt to the world that’s changing around them. It wasn’t always this way.
When I started in business, more than forty years ago, the challenge for most people was to master a domain by learning more and more. Today we face two challenges that barely existed then.
Most people could keep up with their area of expertise by reading the trade press and joining an association. Those things still work, but now we also have to spot forces outside our domain that are going to create disruptive change.
Back then the challenge for most of us was to know more and more about the same thing. Today, we have to unlearn as well as learn.
Those two changes are driving other changes in the way we develop talent. More and more we’re shifting to thinking about learning, rather than about training. That’s moving us away from traditional classroom training with a talking body at the front of the room and toward self-initiated and self-directed learning.
Let me suggest resources to prod your thinking and increase your knowledge about the challenges.
Jon Ingham recently posted about the ways that training and self-development intertwine on his “HR to HR 2.0” blog. Read his post on “Reviewing 70-20-10” to get an overview of the changing mix of training and on-the-job learning as we move forward. Supplement that with Jon’s post on “Integrating Formal, Informal, and Social Learning.”
Harold Jarche posts regularly on Personal Knowledge Management. His posts include summaries of the work of others and pointers to resources.
We may not know exactly how things will go in the years ahead. But we do know that mastering knowledge will be a key part of the challenge.
