Even today and in reputed forums, L&D managers of large companies do little more than repeat that their departments. L&D departments have the mission of accompanying company strategies.
Years ago perhaps department managers or directors of large companies could claim that their role was to establish the necessary mechanisms to support the strategy and enable its deployment. But that was years ago. Today, the high frequency of mega changes (one day a company is a leader of its sector and the following week another has overtaken) produced by disruptive innovations forces that an L&D board, or a corporate university, has to be much more.
In my opinion, the vision of an L&D department and learning has to be precisely to create the future vision of the company. Or what is the same, the specific mission would be to create the environment where it is possible to design the new strategy of the company.
This challenge that corporate universities have to face today is a major challenge, consisting on developing people beyond the known future and thus allowing people today to create tomorrow’s enterprise.
To achieve this, I propose these five actions that I will develop in future publications:
- Making available mechanisms, tools and resources necessary for them to learn from any source. (Let people learn and develop in what most excites them, wherever and whenever they prefer.)
- Having tools so that everyone can track what they are learning and what they are passionate about (even if it has nothing to do with their current job performance), with whom they learn, from where, when and even infer or shape the why.
- Generating a “human-centred” care environment in which all people can contribute to organizational learning with all available means.
- Analysing all the knowledge within the organisation based on the above points, and take the appropriate decisions.
- Recognising and certifying openly, internally and externally, what each person knows and knows to do.
So, in my opinion, L&D professionals have an obligation to devise the ecosystem of human and technological learning that allows, through learning and knowledge, people to re-invent and themselves to imagine and invent the company from the future.
