Work is changing continuously. For personnel developers in companies, more and more trends are becoming visible: alongside strategies for digitalization and New Work, soft skill training is gaining in importance. Find out in this article how personnel developers 4.0 will become learning facilitators in the future.
What Personnel Development 4.0 means
As a personnel developer, you work in a field of activity that is already very future-oriented: on the one hand, you continuously record the need for new skills in your company. On the other hand, you develop future strategies to meet this need. But personnel development itself is also changing!
New terms such as Education 4.0, Trainer 4.0 or Further Education 4.0 show that personnel developers will also have to adjust to new fields of work in the future. The "4.0" describes the expected changes in the learning and working world in the coming years.
What does this "4.0" mean? Based on Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution triggered by digitalization, experts use the suffix 4.0 when talking about future-oriented skills. This usually refers to processes involving digital intelligence and automation. You can find a detailed explanation of 4.0 in this article.
My colleague Hans Peter already wrote about the requirements for Personnel Development 4.0 a good two years ago. The trends listed back then are more relevant today than ever. It's well worth taking another look!
Trends in Personnel Development: Education 4.0
In personnel development, three major trends are currently visible, some of which also extend to many other areas:
Soft skills are becoming increasingly important.
Digitalization is fundamentally changing current processes.
Work itself needs new forms – keyword: New Work.
These major changes are also changing the role of personnel developers: they find themselves in the conflict zone between humans and machines, as well as between increased personal responsibility and new teamwork. Today, or in 5-10 years at the latest, personnel developers are therefore acting more and more as learning facilitators.
But how can you react to these trends as a personnel developer? And what does it mean to be a learning facilitator?
Imparting soft skills as a learning facilitator
Soft skills are becoming increasingly important, partly because hard skills are easier to learn: Google answers almost all my questions, YouTube explains steps for numerous skills. However, how I handle this information falls into the area of soft skills. This is exactly what distinguishes us humans (still) from machines: skills like communicative power of persuasion, leadership strategies, or teamwork.
See also: Revolutionizing the further education industry with soft skill training
Soft skills are becoming increasingly important in the era of digitalization: skills like leadership or communication are best conveyed from person to person.
How the demand for soft skills is changing the role of personnel developers
The difficulty with soft skills lies in long-term behavioral change: it is simply not enough to know which strategies are good for leading employees. I have to apply these strategies in my daily work routine – and that is only possible through practice.
As a personnel developer 4.0, you will therefore offer further training that ideally works “on the job”. A one-day crash course makes sense for hard skills like Excel, but is simply not sufficient for leadership training or communication strategies, for example.
Instead, employees must be accompanied long-term in soft skill training much more frequently than in the past: weekly practice and tips on very specific current cases are worth their weight in gold here – and lead to real behavioral change.
Using digitalization as a learning facilitator
Digitalization is the trigger for many new processes – for example, the aforementioned increased demand for soft skills. For many, the term "digitalization" is, on the one hand, very vague and, on the other hand, associated with a certain reluctance: after all, it implies a fundamental change in many areas of life.
It is helpful to also and especially perceive the opportunities and positive aspects of digitalization: for example, employees from different branches can share ideas much more easily and take part in joint training sessions without having to travel across the entire country.
Digitalization is diverse: our entire working and living world is changing due to the possibilities of digitalization.
How digitalization is changing the role of personnel developers
Personnel developers and other learning & development professionals see themselves more and more as learning facilitators or learning coaches, as Joachim Niemeier from the Corporate Learning Community writes. He refers to a study by scil, in which 225 personnel developers were surveyed.
Key results of the study:
Companies are not digitized enough in 2018.
Companies, and specifically HR departments, know too little about digitalization and corresponding methods.
At the same time, personnel developers rate their own change management skills very highly.
Personnel developers view digitalization predominantly positively.
This means: as a personnel developer 4.0, you see digitalization primarily as an opportunity to expand human capabilities (keyword: augmentation). In training, you focus on the tasks that humans handle better than machines: the soft skills mentioned above.
Living New Work as a learning facilitator
The third major trend is called New Work and summarizes how work in companies should look in the future. This affects personnel developers 4.0 in two ways:
As an "enabler" of new work processes: in your role as a personnel developer, you help to redesign work in your company.
As an employee: in addition to your specific role, you are also a normal employee. New Work affects how you design meetings, where you work from, etc.
Examples of New Work: flexible workspaces, collegial leadership, meetings with active participation, home office, increased self-responsibility of employees.
New Work also means a restructuring of responsibility: the individual employee must learn how to structure their daily work routine in a meaningful way.
How New Work is changing the role of personnel developers
In the course of New Work, employees are increasingly becoming active participants in the company: instead of just carrying out instructions, they are increasingly involved in decision-making processes. This new attitude towards work is very likely to change the attitude towards further education as well.
As a personnel developer 4.0, you are therefore looking for further training concepts in which the participants learn self-responsibly to an increased degree. This also fits with the previously mentioned trends of soft skills and digitalization: employees must learn how to handle the greater freedom of New Work correctly.
In summary, (Further) Education 4.0 at companies means:
Due to digitalization, further training focuses on the part of work that only humans can perform.
With New Work, employees work increasingly agilely and self-directed.
At the same time, employees need support on how they can live New Work: soft skill training.
Personnel developers will presumably act as learning facilitators or learning coaches in the future. This requires further training concepts tailored to the conditions of soft skills, digitalization, and New Work.
Making Education 4.0 possible now: facilitating training online
The three trends mentioned are already changing further education today. In 10 years at the latest, digitalization and New Work will have progressed so far that sustainable soft skill training will make up an indispensable part of corporate further education. Education 4.0 therefore needs a concept that makes the conditions detailed above possible.
This concept has existed for many years and is gradually receiving more and more attention from personnel developers: Blended learning describes the learning strategy of training employees in a mix of classic in-person training and online-controlled self-study phases.
The in-person time (seminars, workshops, webinars) is recommended primarily as a collective kickoff and conclusion: here, trainers provide their participants with the necessary information and motivation. Human proximity fosters the necessary bond between trainer and participant.
The online phase aligns perfectly with the idea of New Work: on an online platform, participants receive short learning impulses over several weeks, which they work through independently – when and where it fits into their daily work routine.
Find out more about the concept of blended learning now and take a look at the three common models: Springer, Reiher, and Sandwich. We have provided a graphic overview for you to download.
