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How can we ensure that everyone has the skills needed to thrive in the 21st century? Three experts sketch out a vision.
We are headed toward a brave new world of learning and work. Continuous learning, along with the development of entirely new workplace skills—at more frequent intervals, throughout a person’s career—will become commonplace. And the time to prepare is now. Since 2016, the Consortium for Advancing Adult Learning & Development (CAALD) has been attempting to clarify the challenges ahead and stretch toward potential solutions. CAALD—a group of learning authorities whose members include researchers, corporate and not-for-profit leaders, and McKinsey experts—recently held its fourth annual meeting in Norwalk, Connecticut. Amidst a set of roll-up-your-sleeves problem-solving solutions, members also took time to learn from one another.
Three CAALD members—Chike Aguh, a principal at McChrystal Group and a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations–sponsored taskforce on the future of the US workforce; Beth Cobert, CEO of Skillful; and Bror Saxberg, vice president of learning science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative—discussed in depth the issue of equitable access. What should leaders do to ensure that no one gets left behind as digitization, automation, and advances in artificial intelligence change the nature of work and the skills that are most needed? Progress will demand innovation so that, in the words of Chike Aguh, we can evolve from getting individuals access “to some type of reskilling,” to ensuring that “anyone, anywhere, can get the learning they need, specifically tailored to them.” What follows are edited excerpts of their conversation, which was moderated by McKinsey’s Allen Webb.
Coaching at scale
Bror Saxberg: We’ve known for millennia that one-to-one coaching by a master is an incontrovertibly great way to build a wide range of complex cognitive skills. What we don’t know is how to do it in an affordable way. How can we make it available for everyone and efficiently disseminate it at scale? This is where technology begins to have a really important role to play.
Beth Cobert: What we’ve learned as we try to do this at scale—particularly in communities that may not have had access before—is that we do need a mix of technology and personal touch, as Bror suggests. We’ve seen the power of an...