Is knowledge really worth anything today?
Organisations and individuals are constantly having to adapt to transformative innovations, new technologies and changing market conditions. This rate of change is increasing with time. How can we be expected to keep up with it all? Is it even possible?
Data and knowledge are being shared on a much higher scale than ever before thanks to cloud computing and social media. But since new information is created so rapidly, it also takes less time for said information to lose its value. Nowadays, ideas, deductions and knowledge are being gleaned, proven and disproven in just a matter of days. If you were to compare a textbook you used in school to the most current version — no matter how recently you graduated — you’ll find your edition is already outdated (Like dinosaurs had feathers? When did this happen?).
“Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” — Dr. Peter Drucker
In fact, the rapid pace of the information economy is making knowledge become more and more outdated every single day. This phenomenon is also known as the half-life of knowledge. Originally stemming from the scientific community, the term “half-life” describes the time it takes for something to halve its quantity. Most often used in the context of radioactive decay, the term “half-life” has been adopted by numerous other fields.
An obvious example is the pharmaceutical industry, where half-life is the time it takes for half of a drug to leave the body. Another example in marketing uses the term to describe the time it takes for a marketing campaign to receive half of its total responses. For instance, an ad in a magazine will have a longer half-life than a tweet. Knowing the half-life is important because it gives an indication of when you should follow-up with your next steps.
The inefficiency of education
The problem with the half-life of knowledge is that the work opportunities available today are 21st century jobs. However, the way that the majority of people perform and train for those jobs is still stuck in the previous century. We still require children to go through a fixed set of educational steps whereas the future of work is flexible and shifting. We’ve been trained to think about knowledge as a fixed asset acquired during a certain phase of life.
The traditional career path expects individuals to have graduated from high school, get an undergraduate degree, and often a graduate degree. However, pursuing degrees in schools where, upon graduation, the skills acquired are already outdated, is not a particularly efficient system. Our current education system adapts too slowly for the current rate of change.
This is not a particularly new discovery. People have often learned more on the job than in the classroom. However, this degradation effect has gotten stronger over time and organisations haven’t gotten much better at filling that gap . Qualifications don’t play the same role in setting people apart. In this new paradigm, more than ever before, they are a starting point.
Given that society is, on average, living longer, an increasing number of adult learners will have to update their professional skills to stay in the working game. In a world where careers span 50–60 years, staying up to speed with knowledge is the new norm. An article by the World Economic Forum underscores this point; stating that the half-life of a professional skill is only five years (1). In other words, every five years, a particular skill is only half as valuable as is used to be. By 2025, most of the skills we currently need, regardless of industry, will have changed. And only those who keep up, will have a place in the new system.
So in a very real way, we will become what we learn.
The Future of Learning? It’s lifelong
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin
Unfortunately, there’s no easy, straightforward way of remaining aware of all the change that is relevant to us. But as long as we stay alert to the fact that our knowledge decays, we can take a healthier approach to learning and decision making. To quote educational psychologist Jerome Bruner, “knowing is a process, not a product” (2). And the reality is that more and more employees are placing an emphasis on their own development. Professionals all around the world are increasing how much time they put aside for learning. Given that we are competing in a global economy for jobs, projects and customers, we need to at least match the level of others just to remain in the same place and not fall behind. As such, lifelong learning becomes one the most essential skills for individuals to acquire.
As an alternative to spending years in a classroom learning an ever-evolving subject, lifelong learning has evolved from career advancement to simple workplace survival. New types of educational frameworks have emerged to cater to this need, such as MOOCs and other online courses. Glassdoor data reveals that among the Millennial workforce, the ability to learn and progress was ranked as a fundamental factor in a company’s employment brand (3). At the same time, only a third believed their organisations to be using these skills well. In the war for talent, the ability to support learning and development will surely set companies apart. In fact, Deloitte’s 2018 Millennial study showed that 73% of millennials and Gen Z which plan to stay with their employer for the next 5 years, say these employers are strong in providing education and training (4). This shows that role of employers as educators is key in retaining talent. In other words, if an organisation isn’t putting in place a vision for future career opportunities, employees will envision their career somewhere else.
What companies can do
In order to succeed in the future, very different skills and capabilities are needed than those which worked in the past. As such, leading organisations are rethinking how to manage careers and put in place the support for learning and development opportunities. Some important questions to ask are: What are the requirements we’ll need to succeed in the future? How are we planning to meet those requirements? Do we have the right workforce in place? How are we planning to close the skill gap? The goal should be having a long-term strategy in place for training and retaining talent. In football terms, think of it as running to where the ball will be.
A company that seems to be succeeding in this space is AT&T, whose origins can be traced back to the Bell Telephone company after its founder Alexander Bell patented the telephone. This huge legacy company’s business has been changing at warp speed over the past decade. Understanding that it’s unrealistic to expect employees that entered the workforce while telephones were still at their height to lead in the age of the internet and 5G, AT&T decided to retrain their existing workforce.
In a $1 billion initiative known as Future Ready, the company started reskilling their employees through web-based courses offered in collaboration with leading universities (5). This enables employees to learn as and when they saw fit. To amplify this, the company also started a career centre which highlights AT&T’s job needs today and, in the future, so employees could see the skills required for each job, the potential salary range and whether that particular area was projected to grow or shrink in the years ahead.
The decision to retrain versus hire was made based on the high cost of turnover. If you have workers that already possess much of the skills and knowledge needed, it makes more sense to retrain them than to hire new workers who may be more educated but take a year to understand how the company really operates. By this year, AT&T will have retrained 100’000 employees for new jobs and in the process, have forged the exact type of agile workforce it needs to face the 21st century.
What individuals can do
To stay on top of the evolving demands of today’s and tomorrow’s job market, individuals need to proactively steer their own ongoing development. In other words, understand that you hold the responsibility for your own development. Question whether your skills are still in demand. Are there gaps in your knowledge? How can you make yourself more employable in the years to come?
Over time, we’ve gradually moved from Intelligence Quotient (IQ) to Emotional Quotient (EQ) to Learnability Quotient (LQ). In that sense, both the ability to learn and un-learn are a key success factor in today’s competitive landscape.
This last skill, un-learning, is often especially difficult to grasp. As humans, we tend to rely on and actively seek out information that supports our existing world view, so that we can stay in our comfort zone (6). This is naturally a problem if we instinctively avoid new, important information, just because it might disconfirm preexisting assumptions.
To overcome this, we need to train our brain as we would any other muscle. We need to train ourselves to overcome the split seconds in which we make a biased decision. Play devil’s advocate and seek out information of people that challenge your opinions.
Additionally, make sure to future-proof your career by prioritising jobs and projects in which you’ll learn valuable new skills that are transferable to different positions. In fact, focusing on building a specific, narrow set of skills that may lead to promotion is foolish when the targeted position may change radically or be eliminated, and better ones may materialise. Instead, focus on developing transferable skills to stay marketable and keep a wider range of options open. This way, you can be well-positioned for the next opportunity, regardless of how it’s labeled and shaped.
If in doubt about what skills to focus on, start with soft skills, as these never go out of style and are near impossible to automate. The World Economic Forum regularly releases future skills reports and articles, if you’re looking for some inspiration. As you’re doing your research, think about starting a “to-learn” list. Many people have a to-do list and can immediately tell you all the different items on there, so why not have a to-learn list too?
Sources:
1. Kasriel, S. (2017, July 31). Skill, re-skill and re-skill again. How to keep up with the future of work. World Economic Forum. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/07/skill-reskill-prepare-for-future-of-work/.
2. Bruner, J. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. London, UK: Harvard University Press.
3. Deloitte Global, The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2016, January 2016.
4. Deloitte Global, The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2018, January 2018.
5. Our Workforce: AT&T Social Responsibility. (2018). Retrieved from https://about.att.com/csr/home/reporting/issue-brief/workforce.html.
6. Kahneman, D. (2015). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
