In a big-picture view, human capital management is the process of making sure you have the right people, with the right competencies, in the right roles now and in the future. To be effective at human capital management, leaders at every level of the organization need to treat talent as an asset that produces value for the organization today and which can produce more or different value in the future. Unlike other organizational assets, talent belongs to the people in the business and not to the owners of the business. So, leaders have to embrace the challenge of engaging people in ways that cause them to invest their best abilities in the business, to improve the productivity of their talents over time, and to acquire new competencies that they enjoy and that the business needs. When recruiting and hiring, leaders need to assess candidates not only for the job that is open but for the broader role they could play and the more valuable contributions they could make over time.Much of our future leadership training and leader development will have to revolve around a full appreciation of the fact that talent is an asset that belongs to someone else yet accounts for a substantial portion of the current and future market value of the business. What percentage of your business’s market value is attributable to physical assets? What are your talent assets worth? What do you need to do about that?

A big part of human capital management will be:

• providing the networks, job assignments, project assignments, and coaching that develop the conceptual thinking skills, problem solving skills, and interpersonal skills leaders need to engage people
• implementing practices and processes that cascade through the organization to make a “talent as an asset” mindset part of the organization’s DNA
• expecting leaders at every level to provide a regular accounting of the increased productivity of the talent assets for which they have leadership responsibility

Although it has always been true, it is even moreso today: the future is invading the present at an accelerating rate. There is no such thing as a sustainable competitive advantage. So, we need to shake up and speed up the present to be able to sustain our ability to find new advantages with which to compete in the future.

The world of Web 2.0 grows out of the view that learning is a process of active inquiry not passive reception. You reach out to the environment around you to fill knowledge and skill gaps. Training, on the other hand, is something done to you. You submit to someone else’s course of instruction. Courses take too long, don’t produce enough competitive value, and are mostly useful to provide a general framework for ongoing experiential, real time, on-demand learning. Nonetheless, sometimes, in your active inquiry, you choose a course as your way to learn.

Experiential learning puts the emphasis on individual and group learning, not expert teaching. The core of experiential learning is the ability to ask the right questions at the right time to: to clarify the nature of the problem; to identify possible solutions; to take action; and to learn from feedback after taking action. The community replaces the course as people learn through conversation, demonstration, trial and error, collaboration, and discovery. A key theme of the employment brand is learning in an apprenticeship model - learning in context. eLearning’s value is not the automation of the classroom and the student role. It envisions learning in context from a network of collaborators. It enables a continuous development and exchange of information that improves performance.

A learning culture values experience as the primary source of learning, superior to courses, and sets up mechanisms for people to learn from their own and others’ experiences. To take advantage of this juggernaut, businesses need to implement a planned abandonment of the “job and classroom” paradigm and migrate to the “role and informal learning” paradigm. We will be successful when we have accomplished the migration to an autonomous and collaborative workforce that continuously learns how to compete more successfully and operate more productively. So, the Web 2.0 workplace demands excellent “learning design” as a replacement for “instructional design”. What are the principles of excellent learning design? Someone who has spent years thinking and speaking about informal learning is Jay Cross; check out his site, books, and blogs. Another person well known for his work in performance support and informal learning is Dr. Conrad Gottfredson whom you can hear on the 12 minute podcast made on 4/15/08.