Martin Reeves
Mihnea Moldoveanu
Adam Job
Andrew Dyer
J. Puckett
Susanne DyrchsIt’s harder than ever to stay in business—let alone run at the front of the pack. Leaders have to navigate what has become the new status quo: an uncertain, fast-changing business environment created by disruptive technologies, economic volatility, geopolitical instability, and unpredictable events brought on by systemic climate change and shocks, such as the current pandemic.
What is the best strategy for not just beating back the threat of failure but creating lasting competitive advantage? Learning how to learn. By building advanced continuous-learning organizations—and doing so as quickly as possible—leaders can attract and retain the best talent and boost performance in the short term, sustaining the growth of skills and development well into the future.
A System for Learning
Learning is the foundational capability that organizations need to address the range of obstacles threatening their sustainability and success. It should be a unique, customized system like any other critical building block within an organization—as elemental as strategy, planning, innovation, and people management. Developing that learning system is a two-step process.
First, leaders need to be ready to continuously anticipate the skills that their organizations will need—many of them associated with fast-changing digital technologies—and then build and assess those skills quickly, at scale, and across the organization.
Second, leaders need to establish a foundation for learning that allows the organization to maintain a habit of ongoing digital reskilling and upskilling in order to stay ahead of the next wave of change. Today, the half-life of skills is not even five years—fewer than three for digital skills.
Now is the time to take this challenge on. A new generation of technology—including AI-powered e-learning and coaching, as well as extended reality training—makes learning more streamlined, user-friendly, customizable, and effective.
And the appetite to learn is voracious. UNESCO, the UN agency that promotes international cooperation in education, the sciences, and culture, has calculated that some 470 million people will demand higher education over the next 15 years—the equivalent of building eight new universities for 40,000 students every week. The public sector may be able to address some portion of this problem, but companies will have to find their own ways to bridge the global skills mismatch.
