Visitors of the L&Dpro Expofestival, which took place in Munich recently, had to have a good command of English. This is because the presentations on current HR trends were peppered with Anglicisms that hint at great things. Human resources and personnel development in 2022, according to the credo, must be completely rethought. However, this does not yet seem to have arrived in present-day HR departments.
Info: This text was written during a visit to the L&Dpro Expofestival 2022 in Munich. The author is Sebastian Bach, Head of Marketing at blink.it, who describes his subjective impressions here.
A dedicated quiz for trendy HR buzzwords
There are probably only a few industries where a quiz ("L&D Quizshow") is organized at the beginning of an exhibition day to explain the industry's vocabulary to trade visitors. No wonder, as the highly suggestive buzzwords practically flashed and blinked from the brightly lit presentation walls of the MVG Museum in Munich, and the interested visitor wondered what they might mean. This already revealed an initial indicator that although the new methods, strategies, and trends of personnel development are hypothetically known, they still need to be recognized and put into practice from the companies' perspective. In any case, the quiz was entertaining.
Trends in personnel development: What about analog?
“Green L&D”, for example, refers to the shift in learning & development towards sustainability, awareness, and moderation. But what does that actually mean in concrete terms when this area becomes green? Will Germany's HR departments and their suppliers consume less electricity in the future, will server load and paper be saved, or will they simply eat less? No, it is about creating awareness of the topic among employees and repositioning personnel development methods in their employee orientation. This fits the spirit of the times perfectly. In an article from spring 2022, McKinsey & Company even goes so far as to suggest that Reinventing HR will determine success or failure in how the working world deals with the aftermath of the Corona pandemic. One could therefore speak of high pressure.
Agile fire extinguishers: Where is the telephone?
However, McKinsey's trend report on personnel development is insufficient at capturing the fact that today's HR department is facing a very analog problem with the shortage of skilled workers. After all, what is supposed to be rethought when the people, i.e., the actual resource and the center of the strategy, are missing? Will an AI help me here? Well, yes, as we will see later in this article. First, however, HR professionals find themselves confronted with the fact that their daily business, depending on the size of the company and its specialization, does not allow them to address such complex questions.
Because if production is at a standstill due to absences, the management's willingness to introduce AI right now is likely to be low to very low. According to relevant experience reports from German HR departments, analog actions are primarily required here: pick up the phone, talk to people, hire people – fast, on short notice, if necessary on the very same day. The people who shoulder these processes are undoubtedly very agile, as they are always adaptable – but their job has little to do with agile personnel development.
The HR department of the future does not react, it leads!
As DER SPIEGEL reports with reference to a study by the Boston Consulting Group, the loss of earnings caused by the shortage of skilled workers is already costing the German economy dearly: A loss of 80 billion euros is to be lamented; the Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg reported 1.9 million vacant positions for the second quarter alone. So there you stand with your briefcase (without brochures, as everything is digital of course) and listen to presentations about AI recruiters that do the work for you, and about avatars that onboard people and solve problems. That would be great. But actually, the HR department of the future is not supposed to recruit and react so much anymore; it is supposed to act, lead, and have an impact within the company! It is the friendly driving force of a self-learning organization! Potential developer, learning animator, trainer, coach, educator, AND talent builder. Again, one could speak of pressure here! In any case, one thing is certain: Instead of vacation requests and training certificates, personnel development will methodologically focus on the following in the future:
Corporate learning
Collaborative learning
Immersive learning
E-Recruiting
Green HR
… and many other wonderful things …
The dream: Data takes the work off our hands
Of course, there are booths and companies at the L&Dpro Expofestival that offer tailor-made solutions for precisely these tasks and can considerably simplify the challenges in personnel development. Nevertheless, the operational reality in many companies looks different, which is why progress and indeed a quiz that contributes to gaining insights are absolutely appropriate here. The industry needs solutions, and they exist. However, you first have to understand them and know beforehand whether they fit into the everyday reality of your own employer. A visit to Munich was able to help in this regard, even though the impression on site was that it was mostly exhibitors talking to exhibitors.
With all the conceptual complexity and innovation surrounding ultra-modern onboarding approaches, cyber glasses, and strategy, it becomes particularly clear in the area of recruiting where the industry's optimists and pessimists are located: Saša Savić, Chief Sales Officer of Cobrainer, is undoubtedly one of the optimists. The title of his lecture was: “The best talent? It is already here!”
Made clear which skills companies are currently still lacking: Saša Savić, Chief Sales Officer of Cobrainer.
Savić and Cobrainer pursue the approach of first decoding the existing skills of the permanent staff and continuing to qualify them according to their needs. The talent of one's own employees and the development of their skills often lie unused in the dark. On the one hand, because further education programs in many places are formulated in simple catalogs and are generally tailored to departments, not to individual employees. But also because companies lack the data in connected form to even make a meaningful assessment of their employees' skill levels and development potential. Recognizing talent and trends and promoting growth individually is therefore the central task of the HR of the future.
The somewhat more pessimistic and widespread approach is well known to assume that the shortage of skilled workers must be countered primarily through more efficient recruiting, otherwise dark times would lie ahead. However, the recruiting approach does not work internally, but externally, and is by definition a highly complex and time-consuming undertaking that probably accounts for the lion's share of an HR department's activities today.
Here too, artificial intelligence can support e-recruiting, especially in the pre-selection of corresponding candidates. The foundation for success: once again, a huge amount of data! And of course, such an implementation is complex, and you have to be able to read and understand the data. But the time savings and the quality of the results in some demonstrations were widely perceived as impressive. If we think this idea further, a modern HR department could indeed have a stronger impact inside the company – if they have the right tools, the time, and the knowledge on their side. This applies to onboarding as well as to further qualification and the transfer of know-how between employees and departments.
