The Rising Need For Lifelong Learning

The employees you hire to do a job today may not be the employees you need five years from now, or even next year. The technology in your field, changes in the talent market, the demographics of your consumer market…these factors and more can lead to changing needs over time, and that time may not be long and drawn out, but may instead be very, very sudden.

Whether you are concerned about your employees’ ability to do what you need them to do, or are concerned about their opportunity to keep making a living when their industry changes and their current role becomes obsolete, you need to encourage them to keep learning. Creating a learning culture in your organization takes care of both you and them.

Earlier this month, Thomas Friedman wrote a column in the New York Times about the growing importance of lifelong learning. His main point is simply this:

The notion that we can go to college for four years and then spend that knowledge for the next 30 is over. If you want to be a lifelong employee anywhere today, you have to be a lifelong learner.

Friedman highlighted a couple examples from observations he’s made in the US:

I recently visited the control room at Devon Energy, a large oil and gas producer, in Oklahoma City. It’s half a floor of computer screens displaying data coming out of every well Devon is drilling around the world.

At the bottom of each screen are two boxes that blew my mind. One box displays how much money was budgeted to drill that particular well per foot, and the other box displays — in real time — how much the drilling of that well is actually costing, as it bores through different rocks, and it’s updated every foot!

A typical well might involve sending pipe two miles down and then turning horizontally for two miles east or west — with such precision it can hit a seam of gas as small as 20 feet wide!

If you’re working on a Devon oil rig today, you’re holding a computer, not just an oily wrench. And if you’re getting a degree in auto mechanics at a community college today, it’s not to be a ‘grease monkey.’ It’s to be a repairman for a computer with wheels.

The nature of our work is changing at a faster pace, which means we need to keep up if we want to stay employed, and that’s just as true for professional jobs as it is for everyone; the growth of artificial intelligence is going to allow many “white collar” functions to be done by machines, so today’s accountants face the same challenges that assembly line employees have faced. Not only will the nature of jobs change, they are also likely to disappear, so your employees will be better able to navigate that change — and will be less anxious and uncertain — if they are already in a frame of mind where they are learning and adapting all the time.

Organizations that see learning and development as a luxury that can be the first thing chopped when budgets are cut are missing the point. Learning needs to be front and center, and should be a regular part of work rather than just being done in addition to work. Building on-the-job learning effectively into daily work, having coaching and mentoring relationships in the organization, engaging in training classes to grow skills and education that grows one’s vision of the world are all essential elements of your culture, not just something to have when it’s convenient. If you do not have a learning culture, then you have a weak culture.