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L&D’s Role in the Digital Age

Brandon Carson

OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES the workforce has seen digital services transform every aspect of business and bring this transformation to many industries including retail, financial services, transportation, healthcare, food service, and entertainment. In fact, it’s challenging to find an industry that is untouched by digital transformation. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, steel, oil, and rail technologies transformed how we work, just as the Internet, mobile phones, and wireless connectivity are transforming work in the 21st century. We can see many similarities between these disruptive periods, but what stands out most today is the speed at which change is occurring. Throughout my 20-plus years in corporate learning, I have experienced the impact of small and large industry shifts, including the move from classroom to computer-based training, the transition to the Internet, the integration of learning solutions closer to the workflow, and the consistent application of new technological innovations into the learning operation. The last several years, however, have seen a rapid rise in the evolution of L&D into a learning business—one that leverages data to make more informed decisions, aligns much closer to the needs of both the organization and the workforce, and wrestles with a newfound requirement to be more in tune with the evolving dynamics of the work environment itself. Through all the changes in my career, I have yet to experience any period more challenging than this. I’ve had to gain much more business acumen and technological acumen and keep up with the changing needs of the workforce.

We had more time during previous transformative periods—often at least a generation—to absorb the impact of evolutionary technology as it drove us to create new jobs and industries, usually resulting in higher wages and improved quality of life for workers. This allowed us to ease into the transition using improved processes and reskilling. The critical difference with the digital age is there won’t be a generational shift—the rate at which technology is displacing jobs is faster than our ability to retrain for the new ones. This may result in a systemic growth in unemployment and potentially drive massive unrest among the displaced workforce. This new paradigm changes our basic understanding of work: People need to stop earning a living and begin learning a living. Given this rapid transformation, the next five years will likely be more disruptive to HR and corporate learning than the last 50, and I have personally felt the challenges and the constraints this puts on the learning operation, as have many of my colleagues.

The pace of change will continue to accelerate over the next several years, bringing more fragmentation and destabilization to our learning businesses and the workforce. We know that innovation creates turbulence, but this turbulence will hopefully result in a stronger match between people’s skills and the skills required to execute the digital strategies every business is formulating. Central to defining and driving this historic reskilling is the learning organization, which must evolve rapidly to confront this disruption head-on.

A Tectonic Shift Driven by Three Forces of Change

Three forces are driving the rise of the digital age: globalization, changing demographics, and technology.

Globalization

Throughout most of the Industrial Age, high-end manufacturing remained in the developed world. Once the cost of communication plummeted in the 1990s and knowledge began flowing more freely, companies built factories in remote places, expanding outsourcing and increasing productivity, which lowered costs. In less than 40 years, we moved from a world of stark economic division to an economy fueled by the Internet and then to a global, interdependent economic system spanning many nations. Globalization has now taken a firm hold in business systems, resulting in a permanent economic interdependence between nations.

This has led to the quickest spread of wealth in human history, driving an increase in consumer consumption that has affected product design, the services industries, and manufacturing. Supply chains around the world have become more efficient to increase volume and turnaround. Companies now source their talent globally, dramatically increasing access to innovation and creativity. As workforces become more globally dispersed and interdependent, talent development strategies need to realign to the changes brought by globalization: technological adaptation, rapid infrastructure improvements, expanded value chains, and increased agility (the ability to build new skills quickly and develop a workforce that can pivot to address new opportunities and market disruption on-demand). HR and learning organizations need to work together to create unified people strategies that focus on these imperatives.

In my most recent position, the learning organization was asked to take more accountability for creating measurable, continuous people development across the entire employee life cycle, including talent acquisition, management, enrichment, and sustainment. This required a much deeper strategic partnership with HR and the lines of business to create a seamless experience for the workforce. I believe that this is going to become the new normal for L&D as it moves beyond just supporting skills development and providing more robust capability enhancement across the entire employee journey. At my organization, we called this the “PX Initiative” or people experience initiative.

Changing Demographics

The rapid evolution of the digital age has also led to the largest migration in human history as people leave behind rural settings to urbanize. In 1950, two-thirds of the world’s population lived in rural settings; by 2050, it’s estimated that two-thirds will have migrated back to urban settings (Economist 2018). Collectively, we have left the third industrial age behind to cluster in cities where digital technologies are providing the most significant opportunity for wage growth and increased wealth generation.

The most dramatic example of human urbanization is occurring in China. The population of its cities has quintupled over the last 40 years, now totaling more than 800 million; by 2030, one in five city dwellers on earth will be Chinese. The country is building more than 19 megacities, which will account for 90 percent of all Chinese economic activity. The three largest megacity clusters in progress include Hong Kong (more than 60 million people), Shanghai (more than 152 million people), and Beijing (more than 112 million people). These megacity clusters dwarf Tokyo (40 million people), which is the current largest megacity on earth.

However, nowhere are cities growing faster than in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of city dwellers will triple by 2050 to 1.3 billion. In 2000, the population of Lagos, Nigeria, was roughly 7.2 million (which is somewhere between the size of greater Philadelphia and Chicago). By 2030 it will grow to 24 million (which is nearly as large as metropolitan New York and London combined). Nigeria is set to surpass the United States by 2050 to become the third most populous country on earth.

In addition to the global urbanization trend, the current workforce is aging—in 2016, a third of the U.S. workforce (about 115 million workers) turned age 50 or older. As these workers start to move out of the workforce, a labor and skills shortage is expected. One of the key factors driving human urbanization is the fact that we more easily share knowledge when we cluster and talent pools are more concentrated, easing the talent acquisition challenge.

The shift in population clustering and demographic changes in the workforce bring new challenges to HR and the corporate learning function. L&D’s primary role is to prepare the workforce for the future today—and it’s faced with a rapidly altering demographic landscape. L&D needs a sharpened focus on continuous learning to update workforce skill sets and enable workers to acquire new skills to properly support business imperatives. People are realizing that they can no longer rely solely on a four-year college degree to guarantee a lifelong career.

Historically, L&D focused on learning-related initiatives. Moving forward, it will need to think beyond discrete programs and projects and embrace smarter, more agile methods to ensure a capable workforce. L&D needs to take more accountability for workforce capability and integrate learning analytics with business KPIs to ensure the focus is in the right areas to drive business value. This will mean re-evaluating the skill sets on the L&D team and potentially reorienting L&D’s place in the organizational structure. The impact of workforce demographic shifts is significant, requiring HR and L&D to completely reorient their learning business.

Technology

Our interdependent global economy affects almost every business system, and the current reconfiguration of work processes is influencing how the work gets done. Almost every business is evaluating their technology systems from back to front, seeking efficiency enhancements and optimization of internal processes to drive the digital strategies they need to execute. These technology improvements are affording more opportunities to communicate with and engage employees in a scalable, consistent manner. Technology, however, is a means to an end. It can facilitate stronger connections, deeper collaboration, and more agile work processes, but people are still required to find the most effective ways to connect that technology with the outcomes that matter most for the business.

Learning consultant and data expert Trish Uhl states, “No matter how smart or sexy technology is, it will only be worth the investment if it’s improving the bottom line and—if chosen wisely—making employees’ lives better in the process.” HR and L&D need a multi-disciplinary approach to the company’s learning ecology—an interconnected system that comprises the processes, context, technologies, and interactions that support workforce capability. Key to the learning ecology is an understanding that most of the workforce isn’t trained on what they actually deal with while working. So, for example, while the primary focus of a training program for a specific role is standard operating procedures, what that worker faces day-to-day likely includes a significant amount of different situations and issues. It’s incumbent on L&D to understand all the exceptions that a worker deals with while in the workflow to get their job done. L&D may not be able to train on those exceptions, but they still need to understand they exist and affect the worker’s ability to execute.

This moves L&D much farther beyond the LMS than it’s ever been. This is the time for the L&D function to partner closely with enterprise IT to ensure the appropriate technology is integrated into the learning ecology, and in a way that preserves the company’s values and culture. There is no longer one tool that can do everything needed as L&D embarks on building workforce capability in the digital age. L&D must be where the employees are. As Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said in 2016, “Any kind of job is going to have a digital component. Digital technology can help more people more broadly than any other industrial revolution.”

The shift in globalization, demographics, and technology is changing the lives of workers at every level and it’s critically important for HR and L&D to successfully develop talent at all levels to be business-ready for the digital age. Understanding how these forces of change affect the lives of the workers we support is important, and devising how HR and L&D responds is where our strategies need to focus. It may mean reorienting where and how L&D is structured. In some respects, it seems like the corporate learning organization is reaching an inflection point: How must it respond to the rapidly changing workplace and reorient to provide more value to the employees and business?

It’s time to think about these questions:

• Is L&D appropriately positioned in the organizational structure to provide proactive, perspective-driven workforce capability?

• Are the skill sets within L&D representative of those required to drive capability and capacity to execute on business strategies driven by the digital age?

• Is L&D able to synthesize the human and digital needs of the evolving work environment to produce an employee experience that meets or exceeds the customer experiences the business creates?

• Is L&D able to collaborate with HR and other lines of business to bring individual point solutions together and work to solve problems from the perspective of the employees?

• Is L&D able and willing to break through the silos between lines of business to serve the needs of the employees?

• Can L&D work with other people operations within the enterprise to reduce duplication of effort, build integrated approaches to solutions, and minimize the overwhelming number of resources that make it difficult for employees to get work done?

• Is L&D willing to become a center of excellence for the people and machine transformations required in the digital age?

The Technologies Driving the Digital Age

The fastest growing technologies driving the digital age are artificial intelligence (AI), the cloud, and big data. Within these three technology categories are additional subcategories, such as workplace automation and the Internet of Everything, that are bringing about this wholesale shift. By association, these technologies are also transforming HR and L&D.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

The McKinsey Global Institute (2019) says AI will generate more than $13 trillion in business value by 2030. And, it will disrupt most, if not all, industries. Those in L&D need to have a fundamental understanding of AI and its underlying technologies to understand its capabilities for corporate learning. AI consists of two separate technologies:

• artificial narrow intelligence (ANI)

• artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Currently, we’re experiencing the rise of ANI. You see this in technologies such as smart speakers, self-driving cars, web searches, and chat bots. AGI represents super intelligence: being as smart as a human. Some say AGI may even be smarter than a human, replicating our brains and beyond. AGI would be able to do anything a human can do (and potentially more). However, while you may hear predictions about how AI will replace humans and even become more dominant, this is only fear-stoking right now. We are easily 50 to 100 years away from AGI creating a super-brain that will think for us and replace what is innately human about us. It will require many more breakthroughs before it becomes a source of worry.

On the other hand, we are seeing a lot of progress with ANI right now. This is where our focus should be in corporate learning. A promising feature of this type of AI in learning is its ability to drive personalized learning. In a recent survey of 400 L&D leaders, Udemy Business found that 31 percent planned to add AI to personalize learning as a part of their strategies. AI can contextualize content for learners by providing recommendations based on individual behavior and preferences, moving closer to true adaptive learning.

Workforce Automation Driven by AI

Automation in the workplace has the potential to affect up to half of all jobs in the United States. It’s not yet certain if AI will bring about the automation apocalypse though. More than likely, the automation of low-skill tasks will happen first. While this may not affect jobs overall in the first wave, it will certainly disrupt many industries as automation takes over rote, manual tasks. L&D needs to link this change with the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) related to jobs, and tasks need to be cataloged and analyzed so that the learning products and systems that support the jobs and tasks can be more easily and quickly modified. In the optimized work future, it’s likely that humans and machine will share tasks within a job and less likely that entire jobs will be handed to automation. Another way to think about this transformation is it’s more likely that automation will augment humans in the workplace. The task of more sharply defining the segregation of KSAs between human and machine may help quantify skills that are uniquely human and can be trained.

Another perspective for L&D to take as it catalogs the KSAs required for job roles is to narrow the focus away from which jobs or tasks are automatable and granularly define how automatable a task may be in the context of how that task is performed. For L&D to ensure its focus is correct, it must move deeper than a surface-level analysis of jobs and dive into the specifics of the tasks required for the job in the context of performing it with the unique variables or dynamics inherent in the real-world application of the task. If the estimates of workplace automation are anywhere near the numbers being discussed beyond the initial wave, the impact will be significant on almost every business. As this unfolds, the L&D strategy should include job and skill mobility tactics and shared skilling and skill overlap development to bridge the gap between intelligent software, machinery, and humans. It’s critical to develop the L&D processes now that need to be put into place in the future to enable both of these strategies.

Currently, AI is not automating jobs, it’s automating tasks. When analyzing jobs to identify the KSAs, document the lowest level tasks people perform to find what can be automated. Ask yourself, what are the job’s main drivers of business value? Within the job, what can be automated to drive even more impact? What are the business pain points the job addresses? Then identify areas where automation can drive productivity, effectiveness, or efficiency. Repetitive, routine tasks are most susceptible. A general rule of thumb to consider is that if a human can do it in one second, more than likely a machine can automate it.

The Cloud

The cloud represents the perfect aggregation of technology and services resulting in content decentralization and ubiquitous access to information stored on remote servers. The cloud (rather than local computers) has become our container of data. No longer will you store the majority of your information on your local device. In addition, cloud implementation in business—public, private, and hybrid—is driving enterprises to rethink how they consume technology. The flexible consumption models available from public cloud players allow clients to own enough infrastructure for their steady state and then rent any extra capacity they need for growth based on demand. This has reduced, and in some cases eliminated, the need to maintain in-house hardware and software, thus reducing the complexity and amount of resources required to manage the company’s infrastructure. Because cloud technology can be implemented and scaled quickly and affordably, adoption has been swift, bringing wholesale restructuring to IT organizations. By 2025, cloud technology will transform business in three key areas:

• Nearly all enterprise data will be stored in the cloud.

• 80 percent of IT budgets will be spent on cloud services.

• The number of corporate data centers will drop by 80 percent (Soat 2016).

The move to the cloud represents the largest information migration in the history of the IT industry.

Data Science and Big Data

Most L&D teams try to determine how to best measure the effectiveness of the learning products they create. The evolution of learning analytics is now (more than ever) capable of providing much more insight into the efficacy of learning products, which is largely driven by advances in data science. Data can now be leveraged to gain more insight into not only employee performance, but also the L&D operation.

Most L&D functions have deployed an infrastructure that enables them to gather data on the number of learners that begin or complete courses, how much time they spend in courses, and their assessment scores, along with other data that describes what they have already done. This is the descriptive analytics process. We’ve used this data for years to determine how successful our learning products are. But in reality, this descriptive data is about how the experience was for the learner—it’s information about what happened in the past.

Using learning analytics, L&D can move to developing more diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics, which will provide more evidence of a learning program’s impact on the workforce. And the more foresight you have into your audience’s knowledge, skills, and abilities, the more business value L&D can drive. For example:

• diagnostic analytics provide:

an understanding of the mechanisms that drive behavior

deeper insight into learner strengths and weaknesses as well as their motivation

data from learner interaction with the content.

• predictive analytics provide:

real-time understanding of learner knowledge and the differences among the broader audience

a usable catalog of skills that can help L&D scaffold learning to match the learner

algorithms that understand and represent the probability that a learner did not understand the answer but simply guessed.

• prescriptive analytics provide:

more personalized instruction to harmonize content with learner capability

the ability to address the neglected space between cognition and the assessment score

the ability to analyze granular interaction data and respond in real time.

Emerging data and AI capability is the difference between foresight and hindsight.

The Skilling Dilemma

L&D needs to be at the forefront of building the skills that are critical for the digital age across the workforce. The skilling strategy must go beyond typical change management—L&D has a unique opportunity to lead the strategic effort to realize the workforce’s digital capabilities.

Here are some important things to consider when devising the skilling strategy:

• Build a digital mindset. The future is digital and the big three technologies (AI, the cloud, and data science) will continue to change how we live, work, and deliver products and services to customers. A critical component of the learning and development strategy must be building a digital mindset in the workforce. You can foster a digital mindset by creating personalized digital development plans for every worker.

• Target the right development area and invest. The painfully slow and archaic process of talent acquisition is causing business to lose traction before they find the best talent. There’s a massive war for the right talent. The imperative should be to get the best people who are innovative, persistent, and courageous at every level in the organization. It’s time for HR and L&D to take a leadership role in strategically aligning talent development to the areas that result in the highest business impact. L&D needs to recognize its capability to lead given constraints in the organizational design: job architectures must be redesigned to reflect new business processes, tasks that move from human to intelligent machinery must be identified, and job design must be revamped with more focus on leadership, critical thinking, and innovation. Too many companies are investing heavily in technology and updated infrastructure but are still flat or negative in their training investment.

• Keep a sharp focus on the human element. As every aspect of work life is transformed, HR and L&D have a unique role in ensuring that the humanity of work is preserved, recognized, and rewarded. We have a huge opportunity to build healthy habits that help the workforce be their best. Concerted efforts in wellbeing (including physical and mental), ergonomics, and the workplace’s environmental design will pay off in a more motivated, healthy, and committed workforce. It’s time for HR to take on this effort and design a workplace for the modern worker.

Conclusion

In this digital age, workers at all levels are becoming knowledge workers. Every worker will be required to use technology in some capacity to get their work done—primarily because technology has enabled us to harness on-demand expertise. There’s good and bad in this: The good is ease of access to the information we need to help us do whatever we’re doing. The bad is that activities that were once mostly manual are now enhanced by technology and require the worker to have some understanding of that technology, adding additional complexity to what was once a manual job. For example, new automated soda dispensing machines offer the consumer a great experience because they can create a custom drink mix from a wide selection of flavors. However, maintaining and troubleshooting the machine is complex, requiring the worker to troubleshoot it if something goes wrong. In other situations, it seems the manager occasionally ends up doing something they would have traditionally delegated to their staff. On the flip side, their staff ends up learning more about technology simply because the computer was introduced.

This is not a new phenomenon; technology has just accelerated it. Technology is not only reshaping work, it’s also reshaping the very meaning of employment. Large corporations have a remarkable power to embrace and enable change that can positively affect not only the workplace but the world itself. There has never been more opportunity than now. The barriers of entry are low, the tools are powerful, and the need is great.