Friday 7 February 2020
Inside Learning Technologies e-Magazine Page 23
Learning finds a way With Industry 4.0 knocking at the door, L&D needs to evolve in order to survive. Around 66 million years ago a comet hit the earth, causing what is known today as the K-T Extinction Event. The resulting impact winter scythed away about 75% of all life on Earth, including the majority of the dinosaurs. The very few species that survived did so by evolving and adapting to the vastly changed environment. Many businesses view digital transformation in the same way as that comet. Automation and AI in particular are causing top-to-bottom disruption, shrinking the lifetimes of many skillsets. This is a major concern for many people, learning leaders included – particularly if their current roles rely on those very skillsets that seem to be evaporating like morning dew. But the key to survival is to practice what you preach.
This is, after all, an industry that is all about developing new skills and putting them into practice. As old roles vanish, new ones are emerging. So, what are the new roles that are emerging as a result of the digital shake-up? Here are a few. Performance Consultant One of the biggest paradigm shifts in L&D is the change from order taker to value maker. Whatever the learning needs of a business, the answer today is almost never going to be ‘a course’. L&D teams are expected to provide solutions that are immediately effective and engaging – and, like every other business unit, the pressure is on for L&D to prove its value to the business. That isn’t going to happen by sitting around waiting for the business to come calling. Instead, The Performance Consultant is the one who actively approaches and engages with the business units, looking at the business challenges that they face, and thinking of ways to design L&D solutions to overcome those challenges and (measurably) drive performance upwards.