The Expertise Economy

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• Even more troubling, leaders sometimes find after hiring new grads that they are wholly unprepared to succeed at their jobs or to navigate the real world of work, especially in this challenging and rapidly changing environment.
• Today, the vital skill set for success includes learning agility (the ability to learn new things quickly), collaboration and teamwork, perseverance, curiosity, and the ability to question the world around you. If you aren’t ready and willing to learn every day and keep up with a rapidly changing world, you can’t and won’t stay competitive.
• As Stephenson said to the New York Times, “There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop.” He added that people who dedicate less than an ideal 5-10 hours a week to learning “will obsolete themselves with the technology.”8 This includes articles and books, podcasts, videos, etc. People are learning a lot more than they think but don’t always categorize it as learning, and we discuss this later in the book.
• The financial services company Visa, realizing the urgency and strategic nature of skilling its workforce, moved its learning function out of HR and into their corporate strategy division.
• No doubt, these self-driven experts who can learn quickly are crucial to your company’s success, and you need to nurture their ability to build new skills continuously. But to stay genuinely competitive—to grow your talent base—you need to focus on developing new experts, on helping everyone on your team close their personal skills gaps and master specialized capabilities. And the way to do that is by encouraging them to “own” their professional development every day.