LUMINARY PERSPECTIVE
The Future Is Closer Than You Think
The future is much closer than we think. We speak of the past, present, and future in the same way we talk about the Earth, horizon, and sky or the sea, shoreline, and shore. The horizon and the shoreline are imaginary dividing lines. The present is a lot like that. It is a line we imagine between the past and the future.
In the section that follows you will find outstanding thinking about a future that is so close. It is a future in which talent development professionals will leverage artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, machine learning, and analytics. One in which mass personalization, bots, and geofencing will all be part of our repertoire. A future in which the role of talent development expands to concerns about organization development, performance management, inclusion, equity, employee experience, culture, and brand.
Learning Will Be the Job
I think that these essential aspects of the future are driven by a single monumental shift: Learning will be the work. Learning will be the job. We have long thought of lifelong development as an increasingly necessary support for job success. This is different. Learning will be the preeminent requirement of the job itself.
It is easy to apply this notion to researchers or to those who work to discover a new therapy or invent a new machine or algorithm. But it will soon apply to most of those we support. As AI takes on more repetitive and straightforward tasks, jobs are being deconstructed and reformed into new and often temporary constructs where learning may be the only lasting responsibility.
Organizations have declared that their future success demands they be agile and innovative. If that is true, then everyone in the organization should, as a part of their job, learn new things and do things they have never done.
Creating a culture of learning is not going to be about initiatives or programs. It will not even be about embedding learning in the flow of work. It is going to be about enabling learning as work. It is incumbent on all of us to begin the process (if we have not already) of looking at each job and understanding which part of it will be learning. Upskilling and reskilling will not be a process of retraining employees from one set of capabilities to another; rather, it will be the nature of every job. In fact, in just a few years reskilling will likely be the top responsibility of many jobs.
Everyone Will Own Their Development
We are already in an era when learners control their own development. Technology enabled us to create more tools, make them more widely available, and make them more time and cost effective. We found we could make talent development more flexible, personal, and immediate. This is the dominant mode of talent development in corporations today. As learning becomes a requirement of the job, people will exercise their control to take ownership of their development. Organizations will still place requirements on their employees, but talent development will cede control of the process. In doing so, we will help learners optimize what they control. Talent development’s role will be to create immediate connectivity and a massive, ubiquitous availability of resources to support universal authorship and make development resources searchable, editable, sampleable, linkable, feedable, and taggable.
Modular Talent Will Require Modular Talent Development
Universities are already rethinking the value of degrees, and companies are reconsidering their curriculums. The future is a place where jobs will be constructed in the moment of need and expire when the purpose they serve has been met. Sometimes those jobs will expire in hours or days. Sometimes they will last months or even years, although they will shift and change constantly. (Eventually, no job will last for long.) We and the AI that supports us will identify combinations of capabilities needed for a task or project and temporarily assemble those capabilities by rapid identification of the person or group of people who possess them. Job titles will give way to capability collections. We have long argued that breaking down information into smaller and smaller bits makes it easier for the learner to consume. In the future, microlearning will be a requirement of development as possible combinations of capabilities become too complex and requirements of learners too varied to anticipate.
Modular talent means that workplace considerations will give way to a focus on the workforce. Place and time will become increasingly irrelevant. The workforce will be unlimited, and the workplace will be always and everywhere. Development resources, therefore, will also need to be always and everywhere.
Democratization of Development Will Be Essential
If traditional jobs do not exist, neither will traditional roles. Individuals will have multiple specializations and credentials that will be constantly changing. What we think of as leadership and management responsibilities will move from person to person. Roles and teams will be in constant flux. This requires everyone to have equal access to all development opportunities. One of the most critical aspects of inclusion will be a fully democratized development landscape. Our commitment to diversity will require us to make sure that every source of human potential is maximized.
In this future, procession will replace succession. We will not be looking for replacements for existing jobs but for people who can do jobs that will soon be vastly different or do not yet exist. We will focus on developing people for multiple potential opportunities, rather than movement or promotion into a specific role. Agility plans will replace career paths. The responsibility of the talent development function will be to ensure that everyone has the environment, tools, and opportunity to do the next job or any job.
Discovery Will Supersede Authoring
Imagine an Olympic swimming pool filled with LEGOs—about 100 million of them. With about 4,000 different types of LEGOs in 51 different colors, that adds up to about 3 googolplexes of possibilities. That is the future open landscape of learning assets. The role of the talent development function will be to leverage that incredible resource. Our responsibility will be discovering where the best tools and information reside and where and how development is naturally occurring so the good can be maximized, the bad mitigated, and the superfluous reduced. Talent development will constantly reconsider and reimagine what is best for use in that moment, enable its use, and then discard it. That will require us to understand what the organization knows and is capable of, where knowledge and capability reside, how to access them, and where they are likely to be needed next.
Soon the line between staffing and development will be blurred because finding and developing the right talent will become two inseparable aspects of the same thing. Linking to the business will not be so much about connecting curriculums and programs to organizational strategies and goals as it will be about connecting instances of development to immediate needs (which are derived from those strategies and goals). The primary focus of knowledge management will be tracking what we know and what we need to know in real time. And a critical responsibility of talent development will be to help the organization follow the swiftly changing boundary between what needs to be known and what needs to be accessed.
Let’s go back to the LEGO metaphor. In the short term, we may be able to get great value by mining those LEGOs ourselves. In doing so, we will develop the search expertise we will need, because very soon, we will have no hope of being able to find everything that anyone might need. Instead, we will have to help people to do a better job of looking for themselves.
Trust Will Be a Key Deliverable
Where discovery dominates, curation becomes an exceedingly small part of the job, because we keep so little. We are always in search of the new and the next. The greatest service then is guiding the organization and the individuals in it to find and use the best developmental resource most efficiently. To do that, the TD function will be the most trusted source for guidance and coaching of self-development. The future of talent development is helping the organization and each person in it understand where they want to go and how to get there as quickly and safely as possible.
The TD function will serve as the guarantor of quality and utility, acting as the underwriters of development resources for the organization. Clearly, we cannot be everywhere, so we will create and set in motion processes that review and codify development options. We will create guides for self-service, even portals that prioritize the sources and solutions we trust. We will make clear the better or safer options—those we certify as proven (by our analysis) to meet organizational and individual goals, those we endorse as effective though not as directly aligned with the organization’s priorities, and those we accept as containing good information, even if they’re not yet proven effective. In other words, we will make it easy and natural for people to use the methods and sources that are true and trustworthy.
Experience Will Dominate
In a world where learning is work, learners will have little patience or time for learning that is not experiential. Experiential development is the ultimate personalized learning. It is inherently social and mobile. For most people, it is virtual. There is no gap between theory and practice and most of the time assessment will be immediate and practical. Whether the experience is individual, group-based, or broadly collective, the TD function will excel at providing it. Our skill set will evolve from managing programs and curriculums to managing experiences.
Our discovery capability will enable the TD function to identify, capture, and promulgate meaningful and successful development experiences. We will layer iteration and reflection on the experiences we find to exponentially increase their impact. We will strategically plan and curate real world experiences and even design and manage some of them. Our simulations and games will enable people to safely fail, to test hypotheses, and to see the now unseeable things that are part of our lives. And in the process, those being developed will provide a real service to customers, companies, and communities.
The TD Function Will Own the “of” of Culture
In our near future, purpose and culture will be what defines an organization and what holds it together. As people move in and out of teams, even in and out of the organization itself, shared purpose and culture will be what binds them. As people gain more and more control over their work choices, they will create their own employee experience through the decisions they make. Organizations will focus on enabling those very personal employee experiences. Even more than today, culture will be critical.
There is a lot of debate about who owns culture. Is it the CEO? All leaders and managers? Everyone? When we begin to describe the culture we want, the uncertainty diminishes because we inevitably speak in behavioral terms. We want a culture of something behavioral—and developing those behaviors is the work of talent development.
The culture of learning we seek is not the holy grail of culture. Organizations strive for a culture of belonging, agility, innovation, customer focus, collaboration, service, and more. To achieve such aspirations will be even harder in the constant flux of work teams, a hybrid workforce, gig partners, and rapidly changing alliances.
The work of talent development will be to enable every “of.” Because culture is about what we do, we will help people develop the capabilities that serve customers, make organizations agile, increase innovation, and encourage the things that welcome and treasure people of all backgrounds and persuasions. We will help leaders understand the levers of culture and fully engage in shaping it.
The TD Function Will Be the Model
With all this flux, how can we still talk about talent development as a function? Or think about our jobs within the function? One possibility is that the work of talent development will be distributed very differently than today, that ownership for this critical organizational capability will shift and change. But it seems more likely that talent development will take its place among a critical few organizational functions. Just like sales, finance, customer service, and so on, the teams and jobs within it will constantly shift. The capabilities needed and the people doing the work will be in constant flux and evolution.
I think talent development will go first. Because we live and work in the future, talent development will be the first part of the organization to operate in these new ways. We will constantly be reskilling. Our agility as a function will result from our ability to create and combine new capabilities. We will master discovering where development is happening and the capability to quickly find the tools we need to develop ourselves.
I think we will have to first learn and then share how to succeed in this near future. We are best prepared to do it. After all, our work is in the future and always has been.
We can start now. That you are reading this book suggests you already have. So, continue. For yourself, be the future. Take ownership of your own development and start reskilling yourself. Learn everything you can about new developments in our field. Network, especially with people outside your comfort zone (and outside talent development). Model continuous learning. Experiment. Flex. Embrace the digital.
For those you serve, start letting go of yesterday’s approaches and habits. Do not rely on the tried and true. Listen to what people are asking for and even wishing for and try to help them find it. Get out and discover how people are learning in the organization and find ways to optimize and spread it. Give up control. And start democratizing the products and services you provide so that everyone has equal access, regardless of their location.
This is the future I see us heading for. It is closer than we think, and we need to move in its direction with every decision we make. For now, there will still be classrooms and facilitators. We will add incredible value through programs targeted at groups. We will enhance careers with curriculums. But even as we do, we will be building the future. Technology and world events pull us inexorably toward it. And what we can imagine, we can begin.
About the Author
John Coné is a former CLO who consults and writes on issues of talent development and organizational learning. He has advised dozens of companies, universities, and the US government, and has served on the boards of both for profit and nonprofit education organizations. He chairs the Chief Learning & Talent Officer Board for i4cp and is the catalyst for ATD’s CTDO Next group. He serves as a jurist for the CLO Learning Elite Awards. He is a past ATD Board chair, a jurist for the BEST Awards, and an advisor to multiple ATD initiatives. In 2005 he received the Gordon M. Bliss Award for lifetime achievement. He is a futurist, a painter, a bicycle mechanic, and a sock aficionado.
Recommended Resources
Diamandis, P.H., and S. Kotler. 2020. The Future is Faster Than You Think. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Elkeles, T., ed. 2020. Forward Focused Learning. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.
Gutsche, J. 2020. Create the Future + the Innovation Handbook: Tactics for Disruptive Thinking. New York: Fast Company Press.
Jesuthan, R., J. Boudreau. 2018. Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
Jesuthan, R., J. Boudreau, and D. Creelman. 2015. Lead the Work: Navigating a World Beyond Employment. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
McCauley, C., and M. McCall, eds. 2014. Using Experience to Develop Leadership Talent. San Francisco: Josey Bass.
Oakes, K. 2021. Culture Renovation: 18 Leadership Action to Build an Unshakeable Company. New York: McGraw Hill.