“Corporate education courses that teach knowledge in the traditional long curriculum style don’t make sense in a world where knowledge is easily accessible online. Corporate learning should be really focusing on management and leadership.” – Andrew Fayad
The new and recently displaced workforce alike will need training on how to stay useful, according to the Brookings Institute. Hard skills like data science, data security, and cloud engineering will rise in demand. Soft skills will also be at a premium in an increasingly diverse workforce. Leaders of top corporations around the world are anxious about a diverse workforce—a workforce that calls for inclusivity and calls out intolerance. Executives are seeking out diversity and inclusion training to avoid a cultural backlash like the public’s response to Victoria’s Secret CMO Ed Razek’s Vogue interview.
The learning industry itself needs to think about how to design for learners from diverse ethnicities, races, genders, and physical abilities. Courses must incorporate blending learning, gamification, microlearning, and accessibility compliance to instruct every kind of modern learner accustomed to being kept engaged.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway, and the learning industry, like every other industry across the globe, must rise to meet the needs of a changing world. Although we can’t know this early in the game how AI will play out over the next century, we do know that it is already changing the workforce. Corporations are starting to rethink what they want their employees to learn as they turn towards the soft skills like inclusion and leadership. Likewise, the learning industry must understand how the modern learner wants to learn as we design engaging, thoughtful courses for a diverse population.