The Lifelong Learning Notes (for a new economy) - First Edition

Again and again in the last weeks, I was asked to share my observations on what we need to know and learn to deal with our changing businesses and society. I thus decided to launch a new monthly newsletter in the hope that these notes are helpful. 

Each month, I will share insights and best practices in the skills and mindset we need for a new economy that is greener, more innovative and equitable from my work with The DO, my research as author and board member. We are all trying to figure out how to deal with the multi-crises, challenges and opportunities the disruptions in our world bring along. What is it we need to be able to do, know and engage around to succeed with our companies, our communities and simply as people. This is what this monthly update will be all about. In this edition, let me set the scene:

Where on the wave are you?

In 2019, a wave of research and reports gained visibility, which argued for an entirely new approach to lifelong learning. Until then, we had basically looked at capabilities in our workforce as:

1. People trained in schools and universities to specialize and then perform a job. With more experience, they would take on more responsibility.
2. Reskilling as something predominantly for people who lost their low-skilled job and who needed to find a new one
3. Upskilling as something that went along a career trajectory or was a way to make managers better or more engaged

But in the last years, two fundamental shifts have occurred:

1. Automation, digitisation and AI are taking over more and more tasks that humans used to do
2. More importantly, companies across all industries are in transformation to deal with climate change, supply chain disruptions, and changing consumer behavior in times of recession and inflation.

The conversations I keep having with CEOs match the research findings. They all come to one conclusion: For the first time since industrialisation started, we will have to Upskill a large portion of the working population on the job. A research from the World Economic Forum put together speaks of up to 50%, others come to similar conclusions.

None of this is news really and you will probably have thought about this and taken action. But the challenge remains huge both from a societal as well as company point of view. “How to do it well” really is the question.

Some companies that my business, The DO, works with are ahead on their journey: They have started mapping out future job roles and started offering learning opportunities to large groups of employees, even if they at times cannot clearly describe the future role at times.

Other companies I work with, are trying to mitigate the risk by hiring talents they believe have the right set of capabilities to help them into the future, an approach which often turns out to be costlier than developing the people you have.

Others again, are launching movements within their company to tackle both the skill as well as the mindset gap.

In my experience, CEOs have grasped the importance of this more than politicians. Whereas many CEOs in the last year named their people as the biggest asset of the company, I have not met many ministers yet that are trying to rethink the lifelong learning challenge.

In the coming months, I would like to reflect together with you on what works and what does not. In the hope to exchange, explore new solutions, and drive them forward.

This edition’s point of view!

The truism that there is nothing soft about soft skills is true! 

I don’t see the big challenge in giving employees the technical skills they need to succeed. At times succession or the time and cost of training might be an issue but generally, this appears a solvable problem. 

More challenging however is the acknowledgment that content topic skills are not the most crucial ones! And this understanding is relatively new. I lived in NYC a decade ago when the boom around tech education started. For a couple of years, the deal was to spend 10k and a few months on personal upskilling to then make a 100k salary. And whilst digital skills remain key, the trend to learn coding and then be set for life has passed. No matter which research or opinion piece on key skills for the next decade you read, the core skills are about critical thinking, resilience, collaboration, emotional competency and so on. 

Because when companies are changing profoundly, are implementing a new structure, dealing with uncertainty as well as changing market and customer behavior, employees need to be resilient, communicate effectively, build psychological safety and have the ability to do complex problem solving in shifting teams. All these capabilities used to be called soft skills. They are now the basis for a fast moving, agile and high performing team. 

There is good news and bad news in developing these general skills and mindset (I will delve deeper on this in the next edition).

There is awareness of this and companies are making on-demand learning opportunities available to many employees.

The problem is that whilst on-demand learning works for specific skills, watching videos and answering gamified questionnaires does not work with regards to gaining general skills. Learning how to problem-solve cannot be done in theory, it needs to be learned whilst doing it. The data driven on-demand approach does not work really when it comes to the most important upskilling task of our time. 

From the last fifteen years of working in the field, my top three takeaways are:

1. Gaining key general skills happens through learning by doing.
2. Learning cannot thus anymore be separate from work or strategy implementation. Sending someone to a theory workshop and then expecting a ROI is actually counterproductive
3. Gaining new skills works if learning is a journey that empowers people alongside achieving a work goal and master a way of working with their colleagues 

This edition’s resources:

The Economist this month, published some interesting data on the value of a university degree, asking “Was Your Degree Really Worth it”

In terms of content skills for managers, the biggest gap data shows is still in terms of sustainability and green business knowledge (only about 10% of managers know the basics). As this year’s TED Countdown is coming up in the summer, at the DO, we include Johan Rockström’s short 7 minute explanation into almost all our sustainability trainings. If you have not seen it, take a look:

How do you develop talents in a company? Take a look at one of the latest case studies from the DO and Phoenix

If you like, let me know what you make of this first Edition! And let's continue this next month. All the best,

Florian