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Gartner has just issued a press release stating that only 20% of today’s workforce has the knowledge needed to do their job and to foster their career.
The study is focussing on companies involved (or that should be involved) in the digital transformation, where Gartner noticed that 70% of the employees do not have sufficient knowledge to embark in the transformation process and 80% do not have the knowledge and skills needed to foster the transformation and be ready for the transformed business and company.
Interestingly Gartner points out that rather aiming at increasing the individual skills and knowledge it would make more sense to enable and teach individuals to connect to the ones having the right skills and knowledge. In other words they are betting on distributed knowledge.
I was in a team at EIT Digital discussing this point in preparing for the Innovation and Partner Event scheduled in Brussels next week and just yesterday I was discussing the very same thing in the context of the Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Initiative where a radical new education program is being designed, taking into account the evolution towards symbioses of humans and machines.
To me it seems quite clear that pursuing (only) continuous education is leading nowhere. Continuous education is stemming from the realisation that knowledge is deteriorating very rapidly.
Once, as it is happening, the time to accrue new knowledge is longer than the window of obsolescence it is clear that continuous education aiming at making up for knowledge obsolescence is a lost battle.
There is much more to this, and I’ll discuss that in the next post.
