In the innovation economy, adaptability is one of the key qualities both companies and professionals need in order to forge the future, and their future success.
But when traditional education is often based on imparting an established body of knowledge, how can we prepare young people for a career where the job roles they’ll undertake, and the technologies they’ll use to solve problems with, don’t even exist yet?
The challenge for professional development training is to create a system of agile education in order to fill the current talent gap.
The State of Digital Marketing Talent Report from The Online Marketing Institute suggests that “Companies are in need of solid, measurable, and accurate digital talent education. Programs are sorely needed but few are implementing formal team training programs.”
So how do we educate incoming employees to be able to solve overarching problems, determine optimal solutions, and not be limited to any one technology or platform?
Introduce agile corporate training
One solution lies in developing programs that are agile, and can quickly adapt to developments in industry and rapid changes in technology, while still providing strong foundational knowledge in conceptual thinking, reframing, problem solving and project management.
Picture credit: Screenmedia
Another solution for companies will be to embrace the fact that many of these “jobs that do not exist” can be worked on and learned from anywhere. The most important factors that will allow businesses to dramatically enhance productivity through technology and find and retain agile workers are: flexibility and hiring algorithms.
Virtual teams will deliver faster, better - so use them!
Google’s new, shiny offices might look neat, but recent studies show that the most productive teams might, in fact, be the one’s who skip the morning commute.
The company behind WordPress recently needed to close its beautiful offices in San Francisco office, simply because the employees never came to the office.
In 2009, Cisco conducted a survey of thousands of teleworkers. They found that 69 percent said working remotely improved their productivity and 83 percent said their communication with other team members was either unaffected or enhanced by being dispersed.
Young people in the workforce are increasingly choosing the freelance/entrepreneurial lifestyle.
A 2014 national survey found that 38% of Millennials work as freelancers, a higher percentage than any previous generation. Remote workers have also been found to use less sick days, and are less likely to suffer from depression.
Use algorithms to enhance the hiring process
Finding the right person for a specific task is no longer best done through procurement processes and middle managers. Talent matching aided by algorithms perform far better than any middle manager could ever dream to achieve.
There is too much information in this world for anyone to take it all in. Products influencing the future of work will provide effective and credible data and talent curation.
Preparing for the Future
It’s better to be prepared for change than to have the future sneak up on you. As business solutions become platform agnostic, companies demanding professionals who have a broad understanding of strategy, ideation, technology and management, and can integrate knowledge across disciplines and managerial functions.
Additionally, it will be important that companies embrace “future of work” trends such as remote working and hiring algorithms to find and keep bright and adaptable employees.