Learnnovators

THE CHANGING FACE OF WORK AND WORKPLACE LEARNING

I am not the kind to crystal gaze. I lay no claim to being able to predict the future. Now that my disclaimers are in place, let me explain the premise of the post title and what I intend to discuss in this post.

I am trying to re-imagine how my work will shape up five years from now. Five years seem like a pretty short time but in today’s context, it can be a very long time. Anything can happen in five years. Companies take birth and vanish; business models come and go; technology appear, evolve and transform everything.

I am not doing (at least trying not to) today what I did five years back–not only in terms of professional and personal growth but with respect to the demands of the time. Technology has brought about unprecedented changes at a pace that is challenging all notions of flexibility and adaptability. Here are five things/phenomenon that did not exist five years back (at least not in the way we know them today):

As working professionals and L&D personnel concerned with training and organizational learning, capability building and talent development, we cannot ignore the implications of this changing landscape. While Watson and Siri may seem far removed from our task of designing learning programs, the reality is they are not. Anything and everything that impact how the future of work will get redefined are matters of concern to us.

This brings me back to the point I started my post with. How do I see workplace learning shaping up five years from now? To be very honest, I don’t know. But here are five things I envisage will be different…

All of these are tectonic shifts and are already taking place. L&D and HR will have to evolve to meet this shift. L&D teams operating on old paradigms and processes will be ill equipped to keep pace with the change. The role of the CLO will be to drive this change NOW! @joyandlife writes about The Changing Role of L&D and CLO where he mentions adaptiveness, rapid reaction times, learning agility and flexibility as key requirements. The CLO today has to be able to scan the emerging landscape and build her/his team in a way that will enable them to meet the future. In fact, L&D teams should ideally be the initiator of the change before the deluge hits the org.

L&D teams of the future will also require diverse individuals with different skills encompassing areas like strategic business thinking, analytics and cloud computing, mobile computing, community building and management, instructional design, content strategic and knowledge management, social and informal learning, and experience design.

Written by our Guest Blogger, Sahana Chattopadhyay

Sahana Chattopadhyay is an L&D Consultant, OD Specialist, Blended Learning Architect, Social Learning Evangelist, and Blogger.

Sahana’s work cuts across performance consulting, workplace learning strategies from formal to informal and social learning, knowledge management methodologies and adult learning principles. She is passionate about helping organizations become learning organizations through community building, enabling personal knowledge management, and bringing working and learning together.

Sahana has appeared in the list of Top Ten e-Learning Movers and Shakers for the Asia Pacific region for four consecutive years from 2011 to 2014, topping the APAC list in 2014 and appeared in the top ten of the global list.

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