L&D 2020: Shaping change in learning
Work & Business
Big Business
After a decade of unprecedented cross-country mergers, acquisitions and consolidation in many sectors, 2020 sees big companies growing even bigger. There may be less of them but they are monster-sized, dwarfing the GDP of most countries.
Economic governance has changed fundamentally away from the pursuit of profit maximisation and shareholder value. Customer actions over the last decade have forced big business to self-regulate1. It is now taken for granted that consumers demand ethical and environmental business practices from large companies, and this in part has contributed to the vertical integration of supply chains as companies seek to limit the risk of poor ethical practice damaging their brands.
Technology now allows all businesses to continually refine and individualise their B2C (business to customer), B2E (business to employee) and B2S (business to shareholder) relationships. For big companies, as part of their employee relationships, this means increasingly taking on responsibility for employee health, well-being and work-life balance.
As the fight to keep their top talent gets ever more intense, in 2020 the concept of the corporate career or job-for-life is back. After the breakdown of psychological contracts between employers and employees in the 1980s following impact on big companies of early global competition and downsizing, it was thought that the implied social contract of lifelong employment in return for employee commitment and loyalty was dead. Not so. Unlike in the 1950’s however the new contracts are for the privileged few identified at aged 18 for the ‘top talent pool’. With company provision of housing and health services and comprehensive in-house learning and development opportunities, companies seek to make it only for the very brave or foolhardy to consider walking out of the door. Who else but top talent gets a nice house anymore.
In contrast to the outsourcing of support services in the 1990s-2000s, since 2020 we have seen these services become in-sourced, including training. Responsibility for further educations and skill development rests with the business2 which tends to provide it from its own large internal corporate universities and training infrastructures.
Virtual social networks across operations and client base appeal to the millennial generation (those who entered the workforce after 2000). Now in 2020 the millennial generation are mid-career and comfortable with using technology to interact with training, government and work.
1. Managing tomorrow’s people : the future of work to 2020, Price Waterhouse Coopers, 2007 http://www.pwc.co.uk/pdf/managing_tomorrows.pdf
2. Outsights on the global economy: non-economic drivers, http://www.outsights.co.uk
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