The Future of Learning is Tightly Integrated into the Future of Work
For many decades, people used to follow the principle, “Get a college degree, find a job, retire.” The average employee changed two or three jobs at most during their whole career. In most cases, they worked at a company with the belief that their future was secured. The knowledge they acquired at a university combined with annual job-related training was enough to be in-demand.
The rules have since changed dramatically. In times of massive automation and rapid technological progress, 75 million to 375 million people might need to switch their occupational categories and build new skills. According to Denning and Brown, the half-life of a learned skill is five years. Currently, there are 6.2 million job openings in the US that remain vacant. Organizations struggle to find employees with the right skills since changes happen so quickly that previous knowledge becomes irrelevant. We believe that continuous learning is the most effective solution. Data shows that if employees were well-trained, companies across the board could have been saving about $70,000 annually while seeing a 10% increase in productivity.
