Living in the midst of a colossal change

All organizations are changing — what an understatement! As you read through the list of changes, think about what your TD department is doing to prepare your organization and its employees to address each of them. Also consider what skills you require in order to make a difference.

• Job search is continuous. It’s been happening for years, but the pandemic exacerbated it, and now it has become a tsunami. How can TD professionals create a more engaged workforce to retain excellent employees?
• Freelance is a way of life. The number of gig workers continues to grow. Contractors and consultants make up nearly half of the workforce. How will your TD department decide what’s important for contingent labor to learn, and how will you train them?
• The workforce is becoming on-demand. Related to and to some extent driving the freelance work, companies are taking a more sophisticated approach to managing all aspects of the workforce, including the hourly, contingent, and contract workforce. Companies will have fewer employees as we now define them. What role does the TD function play?
  • Demographics are changing. This is not a new development, but baby boomers are retiring faster than ever before. The major shifts in workplace demographics creates a succession planning need. How can you develop a young workforce faster?
  • Office cubicles are becoming a relic of the past. Employees are working from everywhere. Work is becoming a thing you do, rather than a place you go, as more people work remotely from their homes. How do trainers help employees manage themselves and their work in an increasingly dynamic, virtual workplace? How are you preparing to deliver learning to employees who are not centrally located or are in a hybrid situation?
• Job flexibility motivates future employees. The workforce demands high flexibility, and many employees view flexibility as more important than money. Companies offer time-shifted hours, frequent sabbaticals, and results-only work environments. What role do you play in assisting your organization to be more flexible?
• Reputation is critical to all. Reputation is key for employers and professionals. Employees want to work at a company that has a positive reputation, and companies want to hire candidates that have a reputation built on a strong track record. Companies are judged on reputation when deciding where to work. The majority of job seekers will accept a lower salary for a good brand. How do you ensure that your company has the best reputation?

• The world is more connected. Globalization is good in many ways, but the downside is that people may be in demand around the clock. Also, many organizations must integrate systems to work in all local areas to centralize and integrate data for decision making. What information can you share with your workforce to create excellent working relations among people in different areas of the world? How can talent development take advantage of the connected world?

  Unique differences occur in every language. For example, using the colloquialism of “Are you pulling a fast one?” doesn’t make much sense to someone just learning the language. Say instead, “Are you trying to trick me?” Similarly, sarcasm may be misunderstood or seem too aggressive. “Sure it is!” stated sarcastically will be better understood if you say “I don’t think that is correct.”

• Increased cultural differences. Managing workforces that are separated by thousands of miles, international time zones, and diverse cultures can be a challenge. Your organization must be able to create an infrastructure that maintains the diversity of international teams while also empowering local employees. Do you have the experience or expertise in organizational development (OD) that can be supportive in this challenge?

If you were wearing your “critical-thinking skills” cap, you would easily see that your job is essential to your organization’s success. You could be pulled into every one of these trends. They may affect your job directly, or you may be asked to support or find a solution for any of them.

Yes, you can be pulled in many directions. Now is the time for all TD professionals to decide on what direction they want to be pulled in. Think about three things: What do you like to do? What are you good at? What skills do organizations need? View the questions as a Venn diagram. Your sweet spot is where these three overlap.

Blame it on the virus and VUCA

You know about the virus — COVID, that is. I mention it several times throughout the book. I also mention VUCA (Chapters 8 and 13), which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous — terms that reflect the unstable and rapidly changing business world we live in today. Here’s a deeper look at what VUCA stands for:

• Volatile: The V denotes the speed, volume, and magnitude of change that is beyond a predictable process or design. Think of volatility as turbulence.
• Uncertain: The U represents the lack of predictability in what’s happening throughout the world. Uncertainty makes it difficult for anyone to use the past to predict future outcomes. Forecasting is difficult, causing challenges to decision making.
• Complex: The C stands for the intricacy and complicated factors involved in an issue or in planning for the future. Many more dynamics are networked to add to the confusion, making it extremely difficult to know what to do.
• Ambiguous: The A stands for the lack of clarity about the meaning or causes behind an event, making the “why” hard to ascertain. What really caused a success or a failure? You can’t always be certain.

The military-derived acronym and phrase, the VUCA world, was introduced in the late 1990s. The VUCA environment demands that talent development must change its strategy and processes so that TD professionals can better support their organizations.

Identifying how VUCA relates to you

Your organization must be agile and adaptable to thrive in this evolving business environment. You support your organization; therefore, you, too, must be agile and adaptable. Your organization is becoming more flexible, networked, global, and virtual. Your work as a TD professional mimics those same requirements. You experience change with the onslaught of virtual and hybrid classrooms, social and mobile-influenced learning tools, gamification, and your expanded job description.

In his book The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman notes that the rate of change today is much different than in the past. He says that the rapid “flattening process is happening at warp speed and directly or indirectly touching a lot more people on the planet at once. The faster and broader this transition to a new era, the more likely is the potential of disruption.”

As a TD professional, you are feeling this same disruption.

Your leaders are operating in a VUCA world. If your organization is struggling, it is at least partially due to VUCA and the speed of change. All organizations are in the midst of it.

According to Jack Welch, “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”

Many studies in the past 10 years concluded that organizations had to become more adaptive and to learn better, faster, and more economically than their competition to survive. Few organizations had adapted fast enough to be competitive before the pandemic, and many are still trying to catch up.

What does this need for adaptation have to do with you? As a talent development professional, you must help to position your organization to be more successful. You need to help your organization learn and develop better, faster, and more economically than the competition.

Although your efforts may not be defined in exactly these words, researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) suggest that your overarching strategy will likely be to

• Refocus development efforts to hone these more strategic, complex critical-thinking skills
• Reframe development activities to accommodate the faster-paced VUCA world
• Focus less on behavioral competencies and more on complex thinking abilities and mindsets
• Emphasize learning agility, self-awareness, comfort with ambiguity, and critical and strategic thinking

Table 18-1 summarizes some of the things you and your TD function need to implement now. I’ve discussed some of these in other parts of this book.

The trends identified in Table 18-1 are leading to a dramatic reshaping of the workforce and the workplace. You can also see how closely tied the training profession is to these trends. The definition of an employee is on the cusp of a transformation. Employee attitudes and expectations for flexibility will influence where, when, and how people work. Dynamic and agile team structures will become the norm, and the default mode of employment will look more like a contractor for hire than an employee. We already see that the location of work will vary widely. Offices will continue to serve as temporary anchor points for human interaction rather than daily travel destinations. Smart systems will emerge and collaborate with humans, changing the nature of work, and driving a reimagining of work content and work process.

Spending is increasing for talent development

Spending on learning and development has risen over the past several years. Increased spending means bigger budgets. Yeah! It also means more work. Be prepared to continue working leaner, harder, and faster. Although spending for development is up, it is off pace with revenue growth, suggesting that companies are doing more with less.

Finding ways to continue to provide services to your organization’s growing list of requirements may seem daunting at times. What can you do? Begin by ensuring excellent communication with your organization’s leadership. What are their priorities? Where will you obtain the best return on investment? What else can you do? These suggestions are a start:

• Embrace new roles. You know that your role is expanding and changing. Upskilling and reskilling your own proficiency will lead to more responsibility and job opportunities.
• Prioritize talent-development tasks. You may need to focus on doing fewer things. Trainers may not be able to say, “How do I get these 12 programs delivered?” but instead may need to say, “Which of these 12 programs will get delivered?” or “What can we stop doing?” Your job becomes doing the right things with what you have. The current lack of employees will add urgency.

Finding and retaining talent is vital

Human capital is precious and scarce. According to Korn Ferry, more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled globally by 2030 because of a lack of skilled talent. Unique talent in specialized occupations is more important for organizational success, yet harder to find. How do you attract these people to your organization and keep them? Now before you say “that’s not my job,” think about this: Trainers understand what it takes to draw people in, to create involvement, to engage employees, and to provide an active learning experience. It starts with a good onboarding program for a superior “first impression,” followed by fabulous training and development.

Is this your job? Yes. Then after a new employee is on board, your development roles take over. Even this part of your job must change. The pace of technological change accelerates each year, creating even more demand for highly educated people. Your role will be to find ways to train and develop people for the future — maybe for jobs that haven’t even been created yet. Career development is key to employee retention.

Coaching the essentials is key

This section presents two talent-development requirements under one heading: coaching and essential skills. The focus on both coaching and learning basic human skills will grow. Start by learning whether your organization has reexamined its leadership model to identify which essential skills are most important for it. A recent article on the Harvard Business Insights blog identified five skills required to thrive in the future digital workplace: empathy, communication, adaptability, coaching, and trust building. You’ll want to be skilled at coaching and knowledgeable about the essential skills, as described here:

• Coaching: Yes, employees are responsible for their future. But they also need to know what steps to take to develop themselves. They need to know what they don’t know and should learn. A coach probes and challenges to uncover bias and blind spots that prevent development.
• Essential skills: You probably know this skill set as soft skills. Bersin calls them power skills. Soft skills seem to finally be receiving the recognition they deserve. Whatever you call them, it’s critical that we do a better job of teaching members of the workforce how to lead, be empathetic, collaborate in teams, communicate, think strategically, manage their time, achieve results, plan and prioritize, stay organized, and use other skills that are essential every day.

It turns out that soft skills aren’t so soft; they’re critical. They are essential to every employee’s career success and every organization’s results. Employees are becoming more productive but less able to work with other employees. This is a recipe for disaster when most organizations depend on teamwork to accomplish their mission.

The book Skills for Career Success (ATD, 2020) lists 51 essential skills employees must have to be successful. It also delivers a step-by-step process for how employees can develop themselves.

Encouraging continuous learning

Keep the learning going! Informal learning, the unofficial, impromptu, unscheduled way that most people learn to do their jobs, is responsible for 70–80 percent of all learning. Everyone learns on the job. Whether you help yourself, receive assignments from your supervisor, learn from experiences, tap into the Internet, ask a colleague, or join a professional association, every experience that you have and encourage your learners to have benefits both the individual and the organization. As a trainer, you can create an environment that is supportive and conducive to learning. You will also be responsible for helping to create an organizational culture that supports informal learning. Chapter 14 addresses your role in depth. Here are several tools and options that are available to you:

• Mentoring opportunities in both formal and informal scenarios support continuous learning. Experiment with every type of mentoring relationship, such as reverse mentoring, group mentoring, and peer mentoring.
• Gamification, the application of game-playing elements to nongame environments like the workplace, will continue to grow as organizations think about ways to engage their employees, assess skills, and attract talent. Organizations are transitioning from using gamification as a tactic to using it as a strategy to discover underlying business problems, for example.
• Help managers to be better coaches and to encourage their employees to take rotational or stretch assignments.
• Performance support tools such as checklists, job aids, or other electronic tools should be available to employees when and where they need them.

You can help your organization define its “informal learning” strategy, which means finding the right mix of coaching, mentoring, stretch assignments, rotational assignments, and training interventions to meet the job requirements of today and the future.

Planning for a metaverse future

Work is changing at a magnitude that we have yet to fully grasp. Technology such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and big data have an important role in shaping the jobs of the future. Technology changes mean a transformation of current jobs and changes in how people connect to work and each other. Even full-time employees may feel more like consultants and part-time workers as they face unpredictable work schedules and changing rewards and purposes.

What is the metaverse? Well, it doesn’t quite exist except in the minds of some people. It started as science fiction, with its name coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash.

Facebook describes the metaverse as “a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you.” Imagine a hybrid training as a digital experience through which everyone can interact and move about the room as if they were actually there.

For now, prepare yourself by grasping the opportunities that exist within the technology available today with AR and VR.

Tapping into training technology

As trainers, we are tuned into the challenges our organizations face, and we need to accept challenges as a permanent business reality and find the best way to provide support. One obvious way we can provide support is to use technology wisely. I address technology options for training throughout this book. Know what’s available and how to use it. With a growing hybrid workforce and limited travel, think about all the tools you have that weren’t available just a few short years ago. Take time to integrate all the technologies and tools that your organization uses. Review your most implemented training program. How can you use technology effectively? Consider whether you can do any of these things:

• Use Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, and other platforms more effectively to reach employees in other cities or countries.
• Send small nuggets of information, just in time, to employees via their mobile devices. For example, you can send supervisors a list of tips for giving feedback just before they conduct performance reviews.
• Create your own videos (see Chapter 11).
• Design more short virtual classroom modules to provide the same learning as a physical session.
• Invite your CEO or a panel of senior leaders to conduct a discussion online in place of a training session.
• Record and post presentations for future use.
• Create peer-coaching groups or virtual buddies to continue the learning after a shortened class.
• Deliver job aids using social media tools.
• Create an online book club.

The ideas are endless. Your resources are not.

Making use of brain-based learning

Assisting learners to learn faster and retain knowledge longer is one way for trainers to help their organizations deal with the VUCA world. As I note in Chapter 2, insights into how the brain learns can help you be a better trainer. Your brain doesn’t just receive information — it processes it. The brain sorts out all incoming information and tries to make connections. The brain starts learning because it has a question about where new information fits. If adults are invited to ask questions about new information, their brains can do a better job of connecting the new with information they’ve already stored. That’s because the act of learning begins with a question. If the brain isn’t curious about incoming information, it takes the path of least resistance and focuses on something else.

David Rock is the director of the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of Your Brain at Work (Harper Business, 2020). He uses an AGES model that identifies four requirements to embed ideas:

• Attention must be very high; multitasking dramatically reduces recall. The chemical processes to encode memory are activated when people are very focused.
• Generating a mental map of the new ideas requires participant involvement.
• Emotions need to be high; people remember only what they feel strongly about.
• Spacing learning out into smaller chunks is important.

A high AGES score is required for participants to recall ideas. Attention, generation, emotion, and spacing form the AGES model. Practicing in the form of small-group work, gamification, contests, or team teaching can all increase a learning event’s AGES score and help to ensure that you provide support to help your organization’s employees learn better and faster.

John Medina, author of Brain Rules (Pear Press, 2014), presents 12 entertaining and valuable tools to help you understand how the brain works so that you can become a more effective trainer.

Seeing how less is more

One of the outcomes of the brain-based research is the value in presenting content in smaller chunks — even pill size. In addition, trainers are often challenged to present “must know” and not “nice to know” content. Focusing on only “must know” has never been more critical than today. Learners are swamped by a sea of information every day — or as some call it, data smog. You have an obligation to avoid adding to the data smog by identifying only the micro-bursts of information that are critical for your learners to know and that are timed close to the time they need to know them. Align these decisions to your corporate strategy.

Technology can come to the rescue. Mobile learning, social media, job aids (electronic or not), videos, mentoring, coaching, QR codes, podcasts, micro-learning, and other options support your delivery of just-in-time capsules of information: what they need, when they need it, and where they need it.

Clark Quinn, author and consultant, writes extensively on topics such as mobile learning, performance support tools, and web-based learning. His most recent book, Learning Science for Instructional Designers (2021), is available at https://www.td.org/books.

It will be up to you to determine the least amount of information your learners need to know and to deliver it in bite-sized, right-sized portions.

Embracing virtual learning

The pandemic response in 2020 demonstrated how rapidly organizations could pivot to virtual, instructor-led training to reach employees working from home. A McKinsey study concluded that organizations need to “pair virtual sessions with safe, high-impact in-person experiences” to see an impact and the sustainability of new behaviors.

You will also be expected to consider new norms of virtual etiquette. To reduce screen fatigue and build trust, groups may need to create norms about when to have people on or off camera, when to mute, and the best use of virtual or physical backgrounds.

Immersive backgrounds, in which everyone appears to be sitting at the same conference table, can contribute to a stronger feeling of belonging in virtual meetings and digital training.

Begin to learn all you can about augmented reality (AR, a combination of real and virtual worlds) and virtual reality (VR, which replaces the physical world with a virtual simulation). Both provide safe training opportunities to practice a new skill in a real, physical environment. You likely hold an AR device in your hand every day in the form of a smartphone.

Although virtual training is exciting, be sure to use other elements such as micro-learning activities and short videos. Blending asynchronous digital elements with focused, instructor-led learning experiences will deliver compelling learning that can be integrated into daily life for learners on the go. Be sure to review the hybrid suggestions in Chapters 5 and 9. Skilled virtual facilitators are key to results-oriented training.

Training on the run

What about those times when you’re expected to design an interactive training session on short notice? Or when management asks you to condense your session down from a day to two hours? Impossible, you say? You may feel that way, but as the trends clearly show, efficiency and productivity take precedence now. Because having short notice to do anything is more the norm than the exception, these suggestions will help you next time it occurs:

• Conduct a mini-needs assessment to ensure that you’re training for the most important knowledge and skills, and only the most important knowledge and skills: Ask a few learners and a couple of supervisors for their thoughts. Then prepare your capsules and micro-bursts of content.
• Make use of job aids that you can use during the training session and that people can easily reference after the session.
• Use a practical yet simple-to-remember process to teach whatever you need to. A three-step process is ideal. Prepare and present information in small-bite sizes.
• A shortened time frame doesn’t mean that you turn everything into a lecture. If anything, participant involvement and experiencing of the skills they must learn are even more critical. Use a blended learning approach. Direct learners to read content before the session. Spend your time together on role plays or practice activities.
• Identify how you will follow up with participants. Email the next day with reminders of key concepts. Another email or tweet a week later will jog memories.
• You may not have much time for an evaluation, so ask one or two key questions, such as “What is the most useful concept you learned in this session?” or “What is one thing you wished you had learned but didn’t?” This is not a TD best practice and you wouldn’t do it very often, but these are unprecedented times. You need to do what you can to address your organization’s immediate needs when it’s time-critical — but with caution.

Next time you’re asked to do the impossible, just smile and start running!

Including DEI and culture

When conducting training for people from another country or culture that isn’t typical for you, learn all you can. For example, learn to pronounce the names of your participants, and respect personal preferences. If participants have introduced themselves as Ms. or Dr., they’re indicating a strong preference to be addressed in a more formal context. Recognize that a highly participative learning approach may be uncomfortable for some cultures. For example, some cultures don’t view direct eye contact as positively as many people who live in the United States do.

Read books about diversity and inclusion. If you’re working in another country, read material that identifies common gestures and their meanings in other cultures. For example, a thumbs-up signal that to you indicates everything is okay is a rude gesture in Nigeria and Australia. Or check out LuAnn Irwin and Renie McClay’s Essential Guide to Training Global Audiences (Pfeiffer, 2008).

Diverse cultures require additional effort. A diverse audience requires that trainers speak clearly; are careful about giving feedback; frequently check for understanding; give instructions in the same sequence in which they are to be followed; and avoid single-country or nondiverse references. In addition, you should take care with jokes or other potentially offensive remarks, and repeat information when necessary. Make everyone in your session feel included and valued.

Preparing millennials for leadership roles

As baby boomers retire, only half of the positions vacated will have experienced workers to fill them. Millennials will have early promotion opportunities and will require an accelerated rate of development. Consider these tips for designing and delivering training to millennials:

• Clarify expectations. Millennials want to know what is expected of them, how they will be evaluated, and how the knowledge and skills they are acquiring relate to their performance evaluations on the job.
• Take advantage of their tech savviness. Millennials’ electronic capabilities are amazing. They have never known an educational environment that wasn’t subject to constant and consistently changing technology. They view learning and technology as going hand in hand. Online, provide links to additional resources that learners can access if they want to learn more. Or better yet, ask them to research and share resources they find. Design content so that learners can access it on their laptops, smartphones, iPads, or other devices.
• Coach along the way. Millennials appreciate opportunities for coaching, require feedback, and appreciate advice. Use mentors or senior associates during or after training.
• Capitalize on millennials’ desire to network. They are comfortable with teams and group activities, but millennial employees also like to network around the world electronically. Use social media to continue to enhance their skills fast.

Circumstances are different throughout the world, and what has been successful in the past may not be successful today. All the millennials are currently old enough to have joined the workforce, so many are available and ready for your development.

Exploring content for a changing world

Remember what you read earlier about the VUCA world: The volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity inherent in today’s business world is the “new normal,” and it is profoundly changing how organizations do business.

The skills and abilities that leaders once needed to help their organizations thrive are no longer sufficient. Today, more strategic, complex, critical-thinking skills are required. All trainers can help their organizations succeed in today’s VUCA environment. You can do your part to develop a workforce that counters volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

Applying the VUCA model as a framework to retool employee development models may enable companies to identify and foster the skills that organizations need now and in the future.

Pause for a moment and think about it. Even generally, what does it take to work in a VUCA world? Yes, of course the technical and job-related skills, but what’s needed to be successful in a VUCA world? What do your current and future employees need to develop to be successful? What are the white-space skills — those skills that are between the job requirements and competencies?

Bob Johansen, author of Leaders Make the Future (BK Business, 2012) shares skills that counter VUCA in this second VUCA acronym:

• Volatility requires Vision.
• Uncertainty requires more Understanding.
• Complexity requires more Clarity.
• Ambiguity requires Agility.

Imagine that your CEO comes to you and says, “Our employees need more vision, understanding, clarity, and agility.” What are you going to say?

I’ve identified half a dozen skills in each area that provide some meaningful topics reducible to KSAs (knowledge, skills, and attitudes) and should be helpful. They certainly aren’t all-inclusive, and there is some crossover among them. Here are skills you can consider:

• Volatility requires vision, so what skills do your employees require? How about strategic thinking, problem solving, integrity and ethics, predictive analysis, scenario planning, and self-awareness.
• Uncertainty requires more understanding, so what skills do your employees require? How about resilience, managing change, empathy and acceptance, optimism and stress management, discernment, network thinking, and learning to learn.
• Complexity requires more clarity, so what skills do your employees require? How about critical thinking, teamwork (virtually, too), setting priorities, mentoring, coaching, developing talent, managerial skills, communication, and boundary spanning.
• Ambiguity requires agility, so what skills do your employees require? How about change management (again), accountability and action orientation, fostering innovation and creativity, using technology to be nimbler, time management, and collaboration.

All these skills require complete, concise, and timely communication and relationship building. That might be a list of “content” that you need to deliver — whether formally in a classroom, asynchronously online, in a book, informally through discussions, using your social networks, through coaches or mentors, on apps, on a webcast, in a brown-bag presentation, or through a college course; the venue or means doesn’t matter.

Researching new roles

Now, how about you? How do you prepare yourself? Think about your own development and what you need to do to stay ahead.

Dr. Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan is the founder and resident mad scientist at the Thiagi Group. His well-known BCF principle — better cheaper faster — should be your mantra within the VUCA world. And what will you be doing better, cheaper, and faster?

Here are a dozen roles the training profession is experiencing. Some are tongue-in-cheek titles, but every role will be necessary soon and describes talent that you should pay attention to. So sit back, relax, and select a new job for yourself!

• Talent Systems Optimizer: As organizations continue to fold the development function and the HR function under one combined Chief Talent Officer (CTO) hat, you need to think “system.” From a generalist perspective, you need to learn enough about HR processes to help drive new practices into every part of the organization. Your processes no longer stand alone — they fit together in an integrated Talent System. You’ll need to know how to ensure employee engagement — to capture employees’ hearts and minds to keep the best people who can create, innovate, and move the organization forward.
• Innovation Implementer: All companies need to become more innovative. If the C-suite needs to be more innovative, it will require support to implement, inform, deliver skills, share knowledge, and influence attitudes. The learning department is connected to all parts of the organization, and trainers have better-than-average communication skills. The TD profession encourages creative thinkers more than most professions. Someone else may create the idea, but implementing will be in your hands.
• Corporate Coach: You may already be a corporate coach, or you may call yourself an internal consultant. Whatever your title, your skills will be necessary. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, there is a new emphasis on coaching managers to develop their people as well as do a better job as managers and leaders.
• Corporate Content Curator: Content abounds — and that’s not news, but someone needs to have an eye toward the future to determine what employees “must have” and what is “nice to have.” Trainers have faced this question for decades, so that part isn’t new. Information is arriving so rapidly and in such large doses that someone in the decision arena must act as the go-between for the C-Suite and the workforce to make these decisions. After the decision is made about what content needs to be distributed, a plan must be in place for how the content is distributed.
• Engagement Planner: Much like a wedding planner, you will need to be adept at skills that build an engaged and wise workforce. As you’re pulled more into talent-management efforts, you will need to ensure that everyone understands that training is not the answer for everything. The engagement planner role requires skills such as communication, creativity, attention to detail, organization, and resourcefulness.
• The Opportunity Optimist: F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In the future, to some extent, trainers will be required to view all the uncertain and changing issues that come toward our companies and departments, discern meaning, and plan for a future that others may not be able to understand. Selecting and developing a workforce to be prepared for the future requires the ability to see a problem and implement steps to turn it into an opportunity.
• Data Analytics Team: As your organization relies more on analytics, it will also require various roles such as these:
  • Data Hygienist to ensure that data coming into the system is accurate and sanitary.
  • Data Miner to sift through masses of data to discover what your organization requires and what gold nuggets are available.
  • Statistical Architect to create a taxonomy and organize the data so that it’s ready to analyze.
  • Data Engineer to create sophisticated algorithms and models that can predict customer behavior, pricing strategy, and profitable markets.
  • Marketing Maharishi to turn the data models and predictions into bottom-line results.

Yes, some of these roles may not exist, but even without knowing what real roles will exist in the future, you can continue to work on your own development. Share your needs and hopes for continued development. Broaden your skills and knowledge. Learn to be flexible and to watch for opportunities to learn new skills. Learn everything you can about your industry. Set goals and build development plans for your future.

Becoming a lifelong learner

You represent learning. You must model lifelong learning. If not you, who? Be accountable for your own development. Let the rest of the organizations see that you take learning seriously. Stay ahead of the change. One of the most important roles you model is to be a Lifelong Learner Extraordinaire.

The profession has used the term lifelong learning since the 1990s, but you will be expected to model this to extreme. You will have lots to learn to keep up with in your own VUCA world. You will need to be able to immerse yourself in a topic, technique, process, data, whatever, and come up for air with insight for the organization and what it will take to bring the workforce along to accomplish the strategy. Be sure to take the time to keep your skills and knowledge on the cutting edge with continuous learning. Dedicate yourself to lifelong professional development.

Lifelong learning is one of the enabling abilities in the ATD Capability Model’s Domain: building personal capability.

Becoming a lifelong learner isn’t new to the training profession — in fact, we invented the idea. Have you ever thought about all the skills you need to be proficient? I sometimes get exhausted just thinking about everything I need to do my job. This is what makes the job so exciting, but it’s also what necessitates becoming lifelong learners.

Sharpening your skills

Develop your skills and knowledge to maintain your place on the cutting edge. By doing so, you’re providing the kind of development opportunities your employer and your participants expect and deserve. You owe it to yourself to continue to develop your skills and increase your knowledge. Staying in touch with the changes and the excitement of the profession will keep you enthusiastic and passionate about what you do. You need to learn continuously. Learning is paramount in order to achieve all that you’re capable of doing.

You can get an in-depth look at ATD’s Capability Model and the study that created it. Capabilities for Talent Development (ATD, 2020) provides a framework to help you understand and build the required competencies for your professional and career-development journey. If you want to have a more in-depth look at the skills and knowledge required for certification, you’ll want to purchase the Talent Development Body of Knowledge (TDBoK), also available from ATD.

Taking stock; taking action

Step back and take stock of where you are and where you want to be. Determine some measure of success, drive a stake in the ground, and head for it. You can establish measures that include both knowledge and skills. Next, identify a developmental plan for continued growth. Consider several strategies. Make a list of all the things you would like to learn — professionally and personally. Remember, this is an investment in you. If you won’t invest in you, who will?

Maintaining your personal spark

Yes, it’s important to maintain your professional spark. It is equally important to maintain your personal spark. How?

• With physical exercise by gardening, exercising, walking, dancing, playing sports, learning Pilates
• With relaxation through meditation, getting a massage, getting enough sleep, listening to music, yoga
• Through awareness of your eating habits, drinking enough water, eating nutritious food
• With awareness of your emotions by thinking positively, expressing yourself, journaling, having fun, celebrating
• By replenishing your mind through daydreaming, reading, learning something new, observing beauty

Make a list of everything that inspires and rejuvenates you. Put it where you will see it every day. Find the passion in your life. Trainers need to have a spark because we light fires for so many others. Love what you do and do what you love. Becoming a lifelong learner is exciting. It is sure to put passion back in your life.

There’s a side benefit to maintaining your spark. CCL research has found that the practices listed in this section are exactly the kinds of things you need to build resilience — yes, that same resilience that’s on every leader’s list as one of the top skills employees need to improve right now.

You’ve reached the end of this section, but think of it as just the beginning of your exciting profession in talent development. David Peterson, director of executive coaching and leadership at Google, says, “Staying within your comfort zone is a good way to prepare for today, but it’s a terrible way to prepare for tomorrow.”