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Renewal and the ability to change, and resilience, are largely based on the development of competence. Our ability to innovate, utilize new information, experiment, and develop require many skills. This is why lifelong or continuous learning is important for individuals, communities, and society. Continuous lifelong learning creates well-being, competitiveness, and security for everyone in the face of change.
Working life is facing many kinds of changes. Technological change shapes the content of work and specific tasks. Some current tasks disappear while new ones are created. The changes affect our values and attitudes as well as our ways of working.
A permanent employment relationship is no longer the ideal that everyone strives for. Along with it, the forms of the platform economy, entrepreneurship, paid work, and their combinations are emerging.
All predictions suggest that the rate of change is only accelerating. The challenges arising from megatrends also offer many opportunities. Ecological reconstruction or, for example, the data economy opens up completely new earning logic and at the same time also new work tasks. How we respond to changes determines how competitive and prosperous our working life is.
Competence and its continuous renewal are key both in coping with changes and providing them in making use of opportunities. When you want to introduce, for example, a new technological innovation in the workplace, it also requires the development of workplace skills.
This all-pervading importance of competence is not yet properly understood. The situation can be compared, for example, to understanding the effects of digitization. We are not yet able to comprehensively see what, and how deeply, digitization will affect.
Renewal and the ability to change, and resilience, are largely based on the development of competence. Our ability to innovate, utilize new information, experiment, and develop require many skills. This is why lifelong or continuous learning is important for individuals, communities, and society. Continuous lifelong learning creates well-being, competitiveness, and security for everyone in the face of change.
There searchers estimate that currently 80 percent of new skills are created inworking life. It doesn't matter what kind of learning places the workplaces are.
As a place for learning, the work community, the workplace, differs from the learning that takes place in educational institutions in that learning takes place directly in the context. The meaning of the new competence opens up to the learner more clearly than the theoretical situation. New skills are attached directly to work. At the same time, the benefits of the new skills are transmitted directly to doing the work and thereby to productivity, for example.
The work community as a learning environment is excellent also because its starting point is that people are not taken away from their jobs, but learning is made possible at work. In the situation of dwindling talent resources, this is of increasing importance.
No one can solve all problems alone. Not even a big organization. This is the strength of different networks and ecosystems. They offer platforms for multilateral cooperation, development, problem-solving, and learning. The essential thing is to turn your gaze outward. In workplaces that support learning, space is created for individuals to join networks where skills renewal takes place
An ecosystem-like way of working is a tool for companies. organizations, and people to manage in a complex and rapidly changing world. Belonging to the right ecosystems creates a competitive advantage for organizations that they cannot create alone.
The same applies to the development of society as a whole. When we know how to make use of international cooperation and know-how, we can solve urgent problems, ensure our competitiveness, and secure the basis of sustainable well-being.
Jyrki Katainen
President
The Finnish Innovation Fund, Sitra
