The demands of today’s working environment are vastly different to those of just five years ago. Fuelled by technological development, change in purchase behaviour and digital innovation, the pace of corporate life has accelerated – creating new challenges and opportunities for employees and leaders. With the way business is conducted undergoing massive transformation, so too are skills and expertise. This is leading the concept of lifelong learning to becoming a career necessity and not a discretionary aspiration.
So where job titles and roles were once fixed and narrowly defined, many are no longer relevant today. Within supply chain, the emergence of autonomous vehicles, data analytics and robotics is creating an environment where skills required are not clearly defined and as such, the demand for quick learning, agile employees who are able to implement their theoretical learnings into the real work environment is growing.
As part of our exploration into skills and education in South Africa, Barloworld Logistics underscored the growing need for development programmes that specifically teach pertinent skills required by ambitious employees in developing new and more specialised skills – particularly those related to emerging technology tools and platforms. In addition, we believe that managers and leaders need to encourage their employees to be continually learning and upskilling themselves. At Barloworld Logistics the ethos of continuous learning is firmly entrenched, with a plethora of learning avenues open to employees and a culture of skills development actively fostered. From Graduate Programmes providing the first step to eager young minds, to team knowledge sharing and ongoing learning for senior staff, we believe that continuously providing employees with the skills they need to perform better creates a rewarding and agile organisation geared for the future.
“In our view, there needs to be active knowledge sharing, mentorship and communication between today’s leaders and tomorrow’s change makers”.
This type of ongoing learning and development needs to happen at the highest levels too, so that managers and executives are leading by example, and ensuring that their own skills and expertise remain smart, on-point and future-proof.
More than ever before, constant innovation, learning and experimentation are key to future sustainability.
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Works cited
Watkins, C., 2016. Lifelong Learning and the Future of Work. [Online]
Available at:
http://blog.udacity.com/2016/09/lifelong-learning-future-work.html
Accessed on 2nd March 2017
