As we recorded this episode in January 2021, the future of work has perhaps never been more uncertain. The coronavirus pandemic has shifted both how many businesses operate and how many employees do their job.

To learn more about what the future workforce will look like, and training’s role in developing it, we spoke with Keith Keating, senior director and global learning strategist at GP Strategies. 

Listen to this new episode, sponsored by GP Strategies, to learn more on:

• How COVID-19 has impacted the future workforce.
• The skills the future workforce needs to thrive.
• Future training trends to look out for.

Listen Now:

• Training Industry Magazine: L&D’s Role in Change Management 
• Agile Certification for HR and L&D
• Training in the Time of COVID: How Learning and Development is Responding 

The transcript for this episode follows: 

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

Welcome to The Business of Learning, the learning leader’s podcast from Training Industry.

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

Hello, and welcome to The Business of Learning, I’m Taryn Oesch DeLong, managing editor of digital content at Training Industry.

Sarah Gallo:

And I’m Sarah Gallo, an associate editor. This episode of The Business of Learning is sponsored by GP Strategies.

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Taryn Oesch DeLong:

As we record this episode in January of 2021, the future of work has perhaps never been more uncertain. The coronavirus pandemic has shifted both how many businesses operate and how many employees do their jobs. To learn more about what the future workforce will look like and training’s role in developing it, we’re speaking with Keith Keating, senior director and global learning strategist at GP Strategies. Keith, thanks for joining us.

Keith Keating:

Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Gallo:

All right. Well, to get started, let’s start with some definitions here. “Future workforce” is a broad term. So Keith, what do you consider the future workforce?

Keith Keating:

It’ll be all of us, and I don’t want to throw out an age bracket there because our workforce is working longer [than ever before], and then on the other end of the spectrum, the future workforce really includes those who aren’t even old enough yet to be working but if, I guess if I were going to categorize it, I would say that we’re generally speaking when we talk about the future of work or a future workforce, we’re talking about those that are going to be employed and working within the next 10 years. That’s typically the timeframe that we’re talking about.

Sarah Gallo:

Great, thanks for defining that for us. Now that we know what we mean when we say “the future workforce,” what skills will it need to thrive?

Keith Keating:

The best summary, and I’ll give you some details, is our human skills. And so those are the skills that really separate us from artificial intelligence, from technology, from robotics. It’s empathy, creativity [and] problem solving. When we talk about problem solving, it’s more around [the idea that] we don’t need to know the answer to the problems [or] to be memorizing [the answers]. We need to evolve from memorizing answers, especially in higher education. We need to be learning how to think critically so that we can solve whatever problem is in front of us. We need agility, adaptability, social intelligence, resiliency, change management [and a] growth mindset. Really, the list could go on and on, but again, it’s about our human skills, our higher order cognitive skills.

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

Keith, I want to draw at one of the skills that you mentioned, and that’s social intelligence. So we see a lot about emotional intelligence, which I think is definitely related to all the skills you were talking about. What do you mean by social intelligence … is that related?

Keith Keating:

It is related, but it’s [about] how we work with each other [and] how we listen to each other. So emotional intelligence can be about yourself and how you’re reflecting on yourself and how you are reacting, but that social intelligence is how we act with each other, how we communicate with each other, how we build relationships … and the teamwork aspect is really important, especially as we think about the future workforces whether we’re virtual or whether we’re in person, we’re still going to be working with each other and we’ve got to have that intelligence around, how do we work together as a group?

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

Thanks. Do you see these skills shifting at all? As things like remote work become more popular? How are these skills changing?

Keith Keating:

That’s an interesting question. I think that they’re becoming even more prevalent, especially as we’re relying [on] and will continue to rely more on technology. The importance of focusing on those skills that really separate us, the skills that make us human … [that’s] what’s going to empower and enable us to continue to thrive or to be able to thrive in general.

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

Thanks for elaborating on those skills. We’ve seen definitely an increased demand in all of these skills that make humans human. It’s interesting to see how they become more prevalent and more important across organizations. So let’s jump into how L&D can help the future workforce actually develop those skills.

Keith Keating:

We can help them by creating a culture around lifelong learning and help them become lifelong learners so that we are constantly learning and evolving rather than thinking of learning as something that has a beginning and an end. It’s something that is, you go online and you take your class and you go into a classroom [if] it’s event based. Learning is something that’s going to be with us for our entire life, and [we] don’t really ever stop learning, but we’ve got to be more conscious of it and so by creating lifelong learners we can help our workforce be prepared for the future and help [it] to continue to develop those skills. Additionally, within learning and development, we need to be empowering and encouraging and enabling learners to take control over their future, and part of that is an outcome of being a lifelong learner. And I would say the third is focusing on skills. So skills, skills, skills, whether that’s upskilling, reskilling [or] second skilling. It’s [important to] focus on skills instead of jobs, and some people use the term soft skills, but I’m not a big fan of that because they’re not soft. The skills that we need to be focusing on are powerful, and so I use the term “power skills” and within that skills framework is helping our workforce recognize the transferable skills that they have. Those are those portable skills that go with us wherever we go, regardless of our job titles, skills like leadership, problem solving, communication, again, agility, adaptability … any of those skills that are really relevant regardless of our job title. And then really speaking about job title, we need to help the workforce recognize that they’re more than just their job. They’re more than just their job title. There’s actually one study that I recently found that identified over 50% of the workforce create their identity from their job title. And that can really create a limitation on the self-belief that we have in what we can do or who we can become, and we look at what’s happening or what’s happened in the last year within the job industry and the millions and millions of people who have lost their jobs, [and who] therefore potentially lost their identity. We need to help uncouple that identity creation from job titles, because at the end of the day, we’re not constructs. We’re not binary individuals that are represented by these job titles that we’ve been labeled. A lot of times you’ll hear people introduce themselves as, “I’m just a cashier,” [or] “I’m just a sales clerk” [or] “I’m just the teacher.” So they’re already creating this limiting belief that they are just whatever that that title is, but we are so much more than that. And so the question was, how can L&D help the future workforce develop these skills? We can do that by creating lifelong learners by focusing on skills and by helping our workforce recognize that there are more than just that job title, their identity is much greater than that.

Sarah Gallo:

I love a lot of those tips you gave, but especially the idea of soft skills being power skills. I’m going to use that. I definitely agree. I think also creating that culture of continuous learning and upskilling, like you mentioned, is a great way to prepare employees for the future. Well, now that we’ve defined the term future workforce and have discussed what skills it needs and touched on how L&D can help develop those skills, Keith, as we record this episode, how well do you think the current L&D industry is preparing the future workforce?

Keith Keating:

I’m going to answer that on a scale of one to 10, but I’m going to preface it, that I’m part of this. And so, I take ownership here as well as being the industry, but I would say being very generous, we’re at a five right now. We’re doing okay. There’s so much more, though, that we could be doing and we need to be doing to move that five upward.

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

What makes you rate the industry as a five? Could you elaborate a little bit on what that looks like and what it might look like to be better?

Keith Keating:

So I would ask you or the listeners, there’s one question that you should ask yourself right now to try to answer that question is, “Do I know the skill gaps that exist today within my business unit or organization?” So, as an L&D professional, do I know the skill gaps that exist today? If the answer is no, then you’ve got some work to be doing right now because as L&D professionals, we should be able to answer what skill gaps exist today because we can’t focus on the future workforce [if we don’t]. We can’t focus on closing the skill gaps of tomorrow if we don’t even know where we are today. How are we going to know where we’re going tomorrow? So the first question is, do you know what skill gaps exists today within your business unit or organization? The next question is, do you know the skill gaps that may exist in three years? Are you connected to your business units? Are you connected to your competition? Are you connected to industry research to find out where the trends are, where the evolution is happening, where the directions are headed? And if the answer is no, then on top of not knowing where you are today, you can’t figure out where you’re going tomorrow until you start thinking about this broader picture. So you’ve got some research there to do. And so I’m going to emphasize that word research, because I think that one of the challenges that we have as an industry is [that] we don’t do enough research. And it’s not just the industry; I think there’s a lot of this in society as a result of this “Twitter mindset,” where everything has to be 150 characters or less, otherwise it’s not going to get our attention. Otherwise, we don’t want to read it. There’s actually a study, and I can’t remember who it was by, I think maybe Stanford University, where they tweeted out the headline to an article and if you actually clicked on the link to get to the article, it was blank. It was the Lorem Ipsum letters. So it was actually no content. And the tweet itself had been liked and reshared around 60,000 times.

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

Wow.

Keith Keating:

So no one had ever bothered to open it up to actually look at it, to see the data behind it? What was the messaging? We just made our decision based off of the headlines. And I think our industry is part of that. We’re culpable as well. We like these spurious headlines, like for example, one that I advocate against strongly is future-proofing. We cannot future-proof anybody, but I see this a lot in our industry, whether it be an article whether or be talking about skills or a future workforce, it’s, we’re going to future-proof do these five things and you’re going to future-proof no one can future-proof. If I had told you last year, 12 months ago, “Hey, I’m going to give you the skill set, the future-proof [skills],” and then COVID hit and you’re one of the millions of people who lost their job, you’d be a little bit upset. [You might think], “Hey, Keith told me that he could future-proof me and I still lost my job.” We can’t future-proof. What we can do is future-prepare and we can future-ready so that we can adapt so that we can be agile regardless of what situation we face as the workforce. And so the verbiage that we use, the terminology that we use is really important within our industry and so we need to stop using these types of headlines and quick problem solving solutions and you know, [stating that] this new technology is going to help you learn and wash your car and do your laundry at the same time. For me, technology is not the solution to everything. Technology is an enabler, especially in learning and development. And so we need that to take a step back and focus on [doing] more research within our organization and outside of our organization. And part of that also is we need to be better connected as an industry. To me, it feels very fragmented and I think some of that goes back to [the fact that] a big part of our industry is about sales. We’re selling a solution. And [it’s] not always [about] does that solution truly solve the problem, or maybe it does solve the problem, but have we helped our learners? Have we helped our workforce figure out what the problem is first that they’re trying to solve before we start trying to sell them some sort of solution that’s not going to future-proof, but hopefully it will future-ready or future-prepare. And I think too, we also need to be able to respond quicker to our learner’s needs and we need to be closer to them and so for me, that’s design thinking, [and] it’s empathy research and qualitative research so that we are trying to solve the problems of our learners. Part of our responsibility is to have this beautiful toolkit that has a ton of different tools in it; it could be technology, it could be [a] process or whatever’s in there from years of experience and relevance, but when we are faced with the problem, it’s taking a step back and rather than then just immediately going to the toolkit and grabbing the [tool] that we think is going to solve that problem, we need to first figure out what the challenge is for our learners that we’re trying to solve. And so that separates a little bit from focusing on the business, who might be writing the check, to focusing on the learners who we’re truly right to create the solutions for, and trying to help prepare to close that skill gap or prepare them for the future workforce. And so part of that is our [expertise] from evolving, from being learning providers and learning enablers so that again, we can empower, encourage and enable our learners to take control over their future while we’re also more focused and being learner-centric to help them solve their problems. So I know it’s a lot of different responses there and strategies, but that’s why we’re at a five. I think that we’ve got a lot more that we could be doing, and these are just some of the ways that I think that we can help to improve and evolve as an industry, because the reality is our industry needs to continuously evolve, just like technology does, businesses do and humans evolve, learners evolve. We’ve got to evolve alongside them, if not, hopefully in front of them so we can help pave the way for them.

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

These are such great points you’re making. I love what you said about, “We can’t really future-proof anybody, but we can prepare them.” I think last year definitely taught us that we don’t have a crystal ball. So the point that you made about really needing to be able to do your research is such a good point. Do you have any quick tips you can share for our listeners on how to get started doing more of that research within their organizations?

Keith Keating:

Absolutely. So I’ll share two [tips for both] internal research and external research. The internal research can be as simple as having conversations with your business partner about their current year priorities, their current strategies, looking retrospectively at the challenges they had last year. For example, right now I’m having the conversations with [my stakeholders on] what are our 2021 priorities? What were our 2020 challenges? What are the barriers that we think are going to happen, or that are happening, that are going to keep us from achieving our 2021 priorities. Just those three simple points can start the conversation. And that’s just for that initial conversation of what’s happening this year. Then, you need to expand that a little bit and [ask] what’s our three-year priority? What are we looking at? What’s changing this next three years? Talking to our internal business partners, talking to our internal customers, whomever, they may be, looking externally at our competition. What have they done in the past year or two that’s evolved them if looking, researching what have they published on reports in terms of their strategy? And then building on that to go externally I would say, The World Economic Forum, the McKinsey Global Institute and Bersin or Deloitte would be the first three places I would go.I fully believe that as an L&D practitioner, it is my responsibility to be curating this information. There’s a ton of free great content out there on TrainingIndustry.com and on ATD. I like starting with The World Economic Forum because it is made up of such brilliant people across multiple industries and they’re not selling anything; they’re completely agnostic. So for me, that’s my first go-to a couple of times a year just to look at what are they reflective on last year? What are they proposing for this year of the next few years? And then I’ll build off of that. So [having] internal discussions and external discussions [is critical]. One other internal discussion that we can have is [around] creating a skills advisory committee, and it doesn’t have to be anything complicated. It can be us from L&D, a business partner, a customer; it could be somebody externally and we meet on a recurring basis to have the conversation about the two questions I asked earlier, “Do you know what skill gaps exist today?” and “Do you know what skill gaps may exist in the future?” And we have a conversation, and we facilitate that conversation. We pull in research from McKinsey, from Deloitte, and we get a seat at the table because that’s one of the things that L&D has to do. We’ve got to be a more integrated business partner. And when I say that, oftentimes people will say, well, we don’t have the opportunity. Well, make the opportunity. If a table doesn’t exist for you to sit at, make your own table. And that’s where the skills advisory committee can come in. As you can make that own table [and] be the one that sets up this reoccurring meeting, it could be every six months [or] it could be each quarter and invite these people and facilitate the conversation so that we can move from that passive role into that active role of being a thought leader, of being a partner to our organization, to our workforce, so that we can be a part of the conversation and even help drive the conversation to support our future workforce.

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

Thanks, Keith. Those are some great tips. All right. So we mentioned earlier that 2020 changed a lot about the workplace, notably, a widespread shift to remote work and remote learning. Could you talk a little bit more about how 2020 impacted the future workforce?

Keith Keating:

It accelerated changes, but we already knew those changes were coming. We didn’t know exactly how they were coming and we certainly didn’t know that they were coming right now, but we have in, in the industry have been talking about, we’ll just focus on the biggest catalyst, which was virtual work. We’ve been talking about the desire for that, the need for that, the value of that but then we also talk about all the reasons it could never happen. IT wouldn’t allow it, people aren’t going to actually get their job done, businesses won’t thrive, no one’s going to be able to work at home with all those distractions. There was all these reasons why it couldn’t ever happen and then magically it did happen overnight and businesses beautifully reacted to it. We have shown this resiliency, we’ve shown this agility, this adaptability.And so the question you asked is, how has it impacted the future workforce? I would say that it’s only accelerated the changes that we already knew were coming. There isn’t anything that has happened that we didn’t already predict, it just [happened] a lot sooner than we thought it was going to … but I think that it has put a lot of focus on these human skills that we’ve been talking about, the [skills like] agility, adaptability, resiliency, and these are the core skills that we want for our workforce, because the truth is [that] we don’t know what the future holds. We don’t know what type of problems businesses are going to try to solve.  We don’t know necessarily all of the skill gaps or all the gaps in general that are going to exist.

Keith Keating:

What we do know is that we want our employees to be linchpins. We want them to be able to fill the next organizational gap, whatever it is and in order for them to be able to do that they need to be agile, they need to be adaptable, they need to be resilient, they need to have a growth mindset. And that’s what we’ve seen from 2020 is the focus on those core skills and it’s really helped emphasize, and re-emphasize the need that we need to continue focusing on these power skills.

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

There’s a lot of changes that happen because of COVID but it’s also important to think about other things that are happening in the workplace and the world right now. So what other factors are you seeing influencing the future workforce right now?

Keith Keating:

I think the first one is education, and that could be lack thereof. It could be the higher education system not responding quick enough to learners’ needs [and] being a bit archaic. If you look at the 1700s and all of the different functions within the 1700s compared to today, one of the only ones that still exist that hasn’t changed at all is that brick and mortar concept of school. And we have this year of evolved into virtual learning, but I don’t know that, that the curriculum that the design has evolved quick enough to meet the needs of our learners, which we’re especially seeing in K-12 and the struggle that we’re having there. So education is influencing our future workforce. The demographic shifts, the change in size, distribution, the age profile of our working population [and] we’ve got rapid urbanization. So we’ve got a significant increase in the population that are moving to live in cities. We’ve got global economic power shifts and that’s the power shift dynamic between developed and developing countries. For example, Africa is quickly [becoming] and will continue to become a powerhouse when we look at outsourcing. And then we’ve got robotics, automation and technology, and that impact that influence as technology works beside us, as it augments us and augments our skills and the way we work these are all different factors that we’ve got to take into consideration when we think about the future workforce and the influencing factors.

Sarah Gallo:

Yeah, and those are all super important factors that we should all keep in mind, for sure. Well, to wrap things up today Keith, what predictions do you have for the L&D industry in 2021 and how this year will shape the future workforce?

Keith Keating:

I’m going to change the word predictions to hope. These are some hopes that I have for this year. Prediction can be pretty limited or a little bit declarative. So my hope for the industry is that we can integrate more within our organization, that we can evolve and continue to evolve from being order-takers to being trusted advisors. My hope is that we can continue to focus on transformational diversity and inclusion and equity, making our training more equitable for our employees. I’ll give you an example, tuition assistance versus tuition reimbursement. Tuition reimbursement, which most organizations have is not an equitable opportunity of learning because it requires the employee to pay out that money first. And that makes an assumption that that employee can carry that cost for four or five or six months until that course completes and then they turn in their grades and they get that money reimbursed. And so a lot of employees actually can’t take advantage of that because they can’t afford it or some that do have to carry that balance on their credit card, which means they’re getting those credit card fees each month until they get paid off. Rather than tuition reimbursement, we need to have tuition assistance, which creates equitable opportunities, so the company actually pays out that money on behalf of the employees [upfront]. We need to be focusing, or we will hopefully be focusing, on learning in the flow of life. And I’m hopeful about this because we’ve been talking about for a number of years learning the flow of work. We no longer have a stopping and starting point of work because many of us are working remote or working from home. Our lives are blended now with work. And so it’s not just learning in the flow of work it’s learning in the flow of life. I think that we’re going to hopefully see a continued investment in training and development and learning and development for our employees so that we can help them focus on these power skills so that they can continue to establish and build on these critical mindsets that we’ve been talking about, agility, adaptability, resilience. I’m not going to repeat them all. They’re our human skills. So this is my hope for this year.

Sarah Gallo:

Perfect. All right, well, Keith thank you again for speaking with us today on The Business of Learning.

Keith Keating:

My pleasure, thanks for having me.

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

For more insights on the future workforce, check out the show notes for this episode at trainingindustry.com/trainingindustrypodcast.

Sarah Gallo:

And if you’re enjoying this episode, don’t forget to rate us on your favorite podcast app.

Taryn Oesch DeLong:

Until next time.

Sarah Gallo:

If you have feedback about this episode, or would like to suggest a topic for a future program, email us  at info@trainingindustry.com or use the contact us page @trainingindustry.com. Thanks for listening to the Training Industry podcast.