I am currently at a conference where 150 IT procurement practitioners from (mostly) European locations are also in attendance.
The curiosity and interest in these attendees gives me hope for a future in which we all need to become lifelong learners. The days of getting a degree and then being done with your education has now ended. There is speculation in various publications, however, that most people are unaware of this new reality. The consequence of this is what is being called the skills gap.
I, like some authors, feel we are accepting this gap as reality but believe that’s too fatalistic a perspective. As someone who would prefer a well-employed population in my aged future, I am wondering what can be done. And a part of me is also wondering if we over-emphasise the very idea of change. It’s become, since large ERP deployment programmes on the back of business process reengineering became commonplace, a new discipline. Capital C. Capital M. Change Management. So everyone takes it very seriously indeed.
The more I think about it, though, the more I think humans are hard-wired for change. Every day, we age. Every day, people we know drift away and people we don’t, enter our lives and become friends. Our bodies change throughout our lives and only photos and memories remain to remind us of our younger selves. We learn to programme the video machine, and then use an ATM and eventually even master pr fictive (or not) text, and to even embrace the smartphone.
These are all changes we accommodate without much thought about the need for Change Management.
I wonder if we, collectively, could be a little more relaxed than the scare-mongering would suggest we ought to be about the future. And become a little more comfortable with the idea that to change is to be normal. Once we accept that concept, doing whatever we need to do to cope with our future becomes an easier thing to anticipate and accept.
Today’s group of participants were some of the most change-embracing people I have come across in a long while. It gives me great hope we are going to be just fine.