Why do we need a systemic strategy for Reskilling employees?

I have conducted discussions with several HR leaders across the UK, Europe, Australia, and the US.  The week started with an intriguing question from a Chief Learning Officer.  “Why do we need a systemic strategy for Reskilling employees- can we not make sure all courses available and let learning be a self-regulated exercise”?.  As we have been advising a very planned reskilling strategy, rather than giving an impulsive response, we took some time to respond to this.  Our first part of the research took us to work done by professor Eva Tardos – a Cornell university mathematician who has done amazing work in network flow models.  Eva Trados’ famous work is around traffic theory.  Professor Tardos studied extremely congested traffic networks (like in LA in the US or Bengaluru in India), the difference between fully regulated systems (giving very precise information on when we should move) vs. self-regulated systems (honk and move at whim?).  Dr. Tardos proved that Self Routing or Selfish routing has a price of anarchy that is a mere 4/3, which is free for all is only 33% worse than top-down coordination.  This work is very widely acknowledged and adopted in many internet data transfer protocols.

Does this mean a lack of strategy is better?  While this is a fascinating research, the journey in this scenario is short-lived.  The journey often lasts less than an hour, even in extremely congested systems (different in Bengaluru where you can be in traffic for hours).  But the point is this a finite journey.  Learning does not work like that.  Learning is very continuous, where frameworks have to be defined.  Also, people will take a lot of their information from their peers.  If a colleague finds learning Python is tough, quite likely, the person receiving that information will also find it complicated.  This is called Information Cascade – a concept popularized by academician Sushil Bikchandani.  Also, people are outcome-driven, and as a result, they need to understand the outcomes of taking a particular path in learning.  (sort of a Contextualized Google for Learning).  Your learning strategy for GenZ will also be different when compared to others.  So having a reskilling strategy is not only important but also essential.  In the next 12 to 15 months, Draup theorizes that there will be active questions from Analysts in quarterly investor conference calls across all public companies.  This is going to become supremely important.  The biggest plan any learning officer can work on would be imagining the new roles that can be created.  The roles such as Digital Marketing Analysts, Product Managers, Data Extraction and Translation Roles, Localization Engineers, Hyper Automation Engineers are all roles that did not exist 3 to 5 years ago.  But each enterprise has to imagine this.  And not in the context of fancy titles like a– Chief Thinker.  We have to arrive at roles that are scalable with real new age responsibilities that need to be created as Automation takes over.  I think HR should own studying the impacts of Algorithmic bias across all products used by a company (including products that your customer uses).  This may be for a different topic for a separate email.  Another important responsibility is to define the learning DNA of employees.  Educator and Harvard researcher Tony Wagner has developed an effective set of principles around this.  Here is a snapshot of the same.

Source:  Wagner Skills Model (adapted from the Dissertation work done by Karim Waljee – University of Liverpool – Determining Success factors of young adults entering the workforce)