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Features

Published April 2008

Learning in the 21st Century: A Brave New World

  Ted Hoff

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Today’s CLOs have to deal with more organizational intricacy and change than ever before, and this situation isn’t getting simpler anytime soon. To manage this complexity, they need to come up with the right formula of methods and modalities.

Chief learning officers face a variety of new and traditional challenges as they explore ways to hire, train and nurture employees. Compared with CLOs in the past, today’s heads of learning are not only dealing with more organizational complexity, but, more importantly, addressing the demands of rapidly changing business environments, the complexity of skills and capabilities in demand and the globalization of work. In this new, dynamic environment, CLOs must assess and manage a dispersed workforce spread across boundaries, time zones, countries and geographies. And they must manage employees of different demographic groups, all with different needs and expectations and preferred ways of learning.

So how does today’s CLO come up with the right learning approaches and infrastructure — the right “formula” — for dealing with these variables in the 21st century organization? To help answer that question, consider the four major forces sweeping across the business world. Each of these forces are driving change in how we conduct learning.

The first force is the sheer pace of change. But there is a categorical difference in the pace of change in the 21st century compared to where it was in the 20th century. We all know that knowledge is doubling every year. We also know that entire industries have changed their complete business structures within a decade. For instance, IBM has dramatically changed as a business in the first decade of the 21st century. And therefore, learning has to respond by enabling more immediacy in how people learn.

A second critical force is the sheer complexity of the world. Many more complicated elements are involved in connecting various parts of a business’ value chain, and the technologies being created today to accomplish this task are extraordinary. People today need to know more than just one area of specialty; they now must be deep specialists in multiple areas at once.

The third force is globalization. This concept goes beyond a strategy that reorganizes a business structure country by country. A new business model is evolving around the concept of a globally integrated enterprise. What that means is business value delivered in one country will be created by people working in other countries who are part of an integrated supply chain, whether it be services, intellectual capital or technology. In this model, workers are collaborating on a day-to-day basis regardless of distance or time-zone differences. Within this concept, learning also must occur across the geographic boundaries that separate people physically when, in fact, they are working together in an integrated way.

Finally, these forces are driving a need for companies to have a fully integrated approach to how they think about their entire workforce and how they manage an employee population that spans the globe. What should the workforce look like in terms of capabilities? What are the best sources of talent? How do we develop people in an integrated way to fill the roles that are emerging worldwide?

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