Future Needs

When it comes to developing employees, we have a tendency to look at what’s needed today and then focus our development efforts on that. That s useful, but it’s only half of what’s needed.

Employee development needs to consider what’s likely to help people achieve success in the future. When you were 8 years old and in a math class, it wasn’t because you needed to do math when you got home from school; it was because, as an adult, you were going to need to know math in order to live. The same is true for your employees’ development. There are skills they need to use today, and you should make sure they are ready, but there are things they can reasonably be expected to need in the future, and they need to prepare. Otherwise, when the time comes that those skills are required, they will be learning them rather than creating value. Without a future focus for your development efforts, you will forever be playing catch-up.

The World Economic Forum published a study a few years ago called The Future of Jobs that, among other things, looked at the skill sets likely to be most valuable in 2020. With that date coming in only a few months, it’s worth looking at your development program to see if you’re focusing on important abilities, or if you’re mired in the past.

• Complex problem solving
• Critical thinking
• Creativity
• People management
• Co-ordinating with others
• Emotional intelligence
• Judgment and decision making
• Service orientation
• Negotiation
• Cognitive flexibility

These are the “soft” skills, of course. Your employees will also need “hard” skills that are unique to their job, and can also be expected to change over time.

Some of the WEF’s skills are harder to develop than others. A few, like negotiating skills, can fit into a traditional workshop format pretty well, but others, like cognitive flexibility, may benefit from other methods. Experiential learning, such as an escape room or Outward Bound or a similar exercise, can support many of the skills listed, but only if you have some clear learning objectives and an opportunity for follow up and application of those skills in the workplace. The best learning opportunities come on the job, whether through the kind of work someone does or the mentoring and coaching they receive, but again, if you expect people to learn, you really need some structure to the learning, or you’ll just waste the chance.

You might think it’s hard to look to the future and know what’s needed…and you’d be right. That’s why studies like the WEF’s can be useful; it starts the conversation by giving you a list that you can review, and then decide for yourself if those skills apply to you. If not, then don’t worry about them. If the list is incomplete and you think something else is more important, then now you can start planning for it. Just because it’s difficult to predict the future doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, it just means you need to make a little more effort.

Of course, all the development in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t have a work environment where people can actually use those skills. But that’s another discussion for another time.