Challenging the future
Companies face today a lot of challenges regarding their employees, market survival strategies, competition, and ability to catch up with the latest technologic and consumer trends. Still, the main focus to succesfully take care of all of these issues is to take care of its own employees first. Why? I’m glad you ask.
Every company’s first and most important asset: its employees. There’s no way around that. Truth is, companies “decide” their own future by how much they are willing to invest in their employees regarding their knowledge, growth opportunities, cultural appreciation, and career path. It’s the people who will have the chance to make the company go from A to B in X amount of time and delivering Y revenue.
So, how do we challenge the future?
With ability to change and adapt, and learning skills. In an increasingly ever-changing world where people and companies need to adapt to survive, these skills prove to be at the core of the “survival kit”. Of course, there are more highly important skills that employees need to master, but having at least these two skills, they can set the pace for whatever comes next.
The 21st century has shaken a lot of things we thought we had figured out, among them, the work environment. The new century presented us with a list of different skills we would need to master in order to survive in a competitive environment (both personally as well as the companies). Not only are companies and job descriptions changing, but we also have the appearance of the “gig economy” where freelancers are becoming an important sector of the economy which is the ultimate battle of the skills. There is a new set of rules to which we all need to play, some companies embrace this, some others resist to change, and some others won’t be able to change and will slowly disappear. In XXI Century, the “Law of the jungle” is more valid than ever. Competition has made everyone shorten the reponse time and generated better services with more quality and client-oriented improvements.
Regarding the learning skills, the most critical aspect of this is to learn to learn. It may sound strange, but this requires an ability to continously be able to re-shape our own ideas and knowledge into something new given the circumstances. Both companies and employees need to work in developing this skill. Companies are used to work on “knowledge-through-experience”, so, only time will determine what you learn. WRONG. This makes learning a very passive activity and employees stop searching for knowledge that believe will be given to them eventually.
The future is this next minute or five years from now, we need to be equally prepared for both scenarios in order to succeed. Companies need to both attract talented people that can surplus these concerns and to be able to get current employees to embrace the constant change and make the best opportunities out of any problem. Are you ready to live in the future?
