Human Resources Management, or HR Management, is the rudder of the ship called upon to lead change management. The engine of this change is Digital Transformation.
What better starting point to successfully navigate the magnum sea of change than “teaching to learn”? What better starting point than Digital Learning? As of 2016, industry studies have identified corporate training as the single most successful factor in successfully meeting the new challenges imposed by the labor market. If your employees do not feel up to the task, perceive inadequacy against the tasks they have always performed, or feel they are not in a position to master the new means (aka: digital means), there is no other remedy than the great power of knowledge.
What one does not know always generates a considerable distance between the learner and the dark matter. And that is what is probably happening to your employees, called upon today to build a true digital mindset.
It is not their inability, nor their resistance to change that is the focal point HR will have to focus on today in order to implement virtuous change, but rather to take care of the Corporate training of its resources in detail.
The new “digital law” does not just consist of new software, tools, or platforms. At the center of change are people.
Recent industry studies have found that HR managers are now well aware of the importance of Digital, although many of them retain a certain “resistance” in relation to the topic, perhaps only because they do not discern in it a strategy applicable to their specific corporate culture.
HR departments today: 2 opposing trends
Exactly as happened to Galileo and his Heliocentric Theory, it is not uncommon today to find different figures of HR employees: some even pioneers of a corporate culture aimed at continuous growth – and thus hinging on the continuous training of their staff; some nostalgic, who also harbor a certain sentiment toward what they may have built with difficulty over the years and may therefore not want to destroy today with a gust of wind, just because new ways of operating in the market have arrived, at various levels. Thinking about the two profiles, the old saying “if old age could, if youth knew” almost springs to mind….
The point is that both types of HR are in the right, in some respects. However, although nostalgia for something established constitutes a fixed point – in that it represents experience, teaching, and the basis of any successful corporate culture – at the same time one cannot deny the objective validity of the…Heliocentric Theory of Digital.
Just as it was true for Galileo that it was indisputably the Earth that revolved around the Sun and not vice versa, it is equally proven today that “Digital” plays a role at the center of all kinds of business transformation.
It’s the Digital Learning era.
The Heliocentrist. Digital Learning, hic et nunc!
The enlightened HR, the visionary, the analyst, is the one who-quickly-senses that there is all too much to be done and how to do it. He understands all too well that the Industry 4.0 job market presents what industry experts call a digital gap.
The Digital Era imposes a set of new business figures that the Heliocentrist is usually able to derive from his own Staff. And to do so, he implements a user-friendly corporate training system (LMS) that can provide targeted, always accessible and mobile friendly contents.
Usually, this figure belongs to a relatively young age group, which has already been chewing the new digital language for some time and, at the same time, studying and analyzing its application to its specific corporate culture. Not that this solves the problem: the ultimate goal, in fact, will always be the proper training of its employees so that they can properly perform their duties despite the advent of transformation.
The advent of a new corporate mindset
This HR presents uncommon characteristics, consequences of a proactive attitude toward continuous learning-quite useful when approaching a new world, with so many new means to be mastered. In any case, the key remains continuous study and the contextual match between Digital Skills and other skills. One is null and void without the other.
One must, in essence, plant the seed of knowledge, succeeding in generating a training-based corporate mindset. The perfect HR leader, made for a good 60% of emotional intelligence, will be the one who can understand the man first, with his qualities to be profitably applied to the Company’s core business.
So, he will first sponsor to the Head of Training & Development the design for employees of multi-device e-learning plans, not only fully understanding the objective profit in terms of savings (cost of classrooms, teaching tools, etc…), but also in terms of return in knowledge and preparation of his resources. Everyone will better sell what they know thoroughly, at the expense of what they do not master. Sic est.
The Geocentrist. E-learning and Microlearning: great, but let me know more
The Geocentrist is the old style HR, i.e., coming from a corporate culture definitely based on conventional space-time parameters, as well as institutionalism and corporate training plans…Old fashioned. He perhaps intuits the validity and importance of the new digital media, but does not perhaps automatically see their points of connection with his own business functions.
No harm done: he, too, can easily be made aware of the importance of the continuous study imposed by the new parameters of work. What must always be kept in mind is that, alas, no one can think of a total leave of absence from the continuous learning and knowledge system nowadays.
Business management in light of the Digital Transformation
The importance of training one’s employees continuously comes directly from the new Labor Market 4.0.Today people study, work, attend events…on the Net. This has therefore become everyone’s “objective workplace.” Contextually, even if we want to maintain the parameters of conventional training (think of the classroom, for example), what happens in the real world is that content increases. Every day.
Therefore, if until a few years ago one could expect two or three corporate training courses per year for each sector (and that was a lot…), nowadays it may become necessary to train every day, both on corporate products (how else to explain to one’s customer something one does not know?), and on the new digital models of the labor market. So, this will allow one to be able to continue to have a well-defined role within one’s organization and to generate a profit, which only the knowledge of one’s products-now managed by the new digital tools-will be able to put in place. Finally, in order to properly ensure a profitable match between the content required for given industry, the trend imposed by modern rhythms is Mobile Learning.
An ideal incentive for the Geocentric HR would be an immediately applicable test: sponsoring the Training Department in the creation of immediately deliverable training pills (Microlearning) in terms of training via an easy-to-use, multi-device e-learning platform, so that his Learners/employees, as well as he himself, can immediately enter the new magical world of… the moving Earth, without huge trauma.
Knowledge is moving on the Net, and although we continue to conceive of it as static…
And yet it moves
