Is the future of L&D skill-based?

Sitting in a lovely coffee place the other day, conversing about the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a group of people from different backgrounds, we could not escape the question of what will be needed in the workplace in the future. And of course, what is the role of Learning and Development (L&D) in companies to provide it… here is my viewpoint on the subject:

Overall, with the increasing usage of AI as a tool in the workplace, skills around management and usage of AI will become more important. Data cleaning, prompting, assessing results, and re-prompting, the skill to use different AI models for different types of work, and in general digitalizing the processes and data we have used and gathered so far, lead to the assumption that more skill-based development will be needed.

Consequently, we see movement in many workplaces to focus more on skill-based hiring and skill training. Certainly, this is perpetuated by the ongoing economic crisis in many sectors, leading to more hesitant spending on L&D, the resurfacing of the "infamous" ROI on L&D, and a focus on short-term skills that can be employed immediately.

While all of this makes certainly sense, I would like to invite a more long-term viewpoint in:

In the closer future and potentially in many areas for forever, human beings will be a part of the equation. It's humans who drive and enable digitalization of data and processes. It's humans who write prompts and re-prompts. It's largely humans who will oversee final decision making. Most of the digital revolution in industries will be a product knit by the interweaving of human work and AI work.

As we have shown extensively in the field of behavioral economics, the human mind has a tendency for preferences and biases. Following work by scientists like Daniel Kahnemann and Daniel Ariely, we have proven that decisions taken by humans are often skewed, by processes that often help us but sometimes also hinder us. We know that humans sometimes follow their interest unscrupulously. We have seen the phenomenon of group-think many times, and we still see it in today's global politics (plenty of it..). We also learned about it when it became public that some AIs had been trained using biased data in the first place.

Therefore, skill-based development only jumps too short.

We need to make sure that humans further develop critical thinking skills, that they can reflect about themselves and their actions, that they can steer their moods and emotions, that they learn about and overcome their biases, that they are able to weigh personal interests and greater goods. That they can express themselves in a way that allows communication. That they are versed in working with other humans. That they maneuver their own decision making. That they can understand and replicate processes. And that they can assess the quality of highly complex results delivered by an AI and when it is best to re-engineer again.

All of this requires more than skill training. It requires us decision takers and educators in L&D to make sure people nurture their minds and personalities to a point where they can be an adequate companion and opponent to an AI.

Hence, I am convinced that just investing in skill-based training is jumping too short and will actually hamper the digital revolution. Companies are well advised to simultaneously keep funding personal growth and enable their employees to develop self-authorship. So we can find the way forward from today to an integrated human-AI future, that truly creates value.

**All blog-posts are written by me and reflect my personal opinion and viewpoint at the time of publishing. While I am convinced that AI has great benefits, I personally prefer to read what other humans think. Therefore, AI is only used to support the wording and grammar, not the content of the posts.