Learning and Development in 2020: Trends, Predictions and How to Prepare

We’re almost a month into the new year, and the question on many managers’ and company owners’ minds is how to prepare for the upcoming changes in the business world. And it is changing. Faster than ever.

Employee development and workplace learning are some of the most critical areas that companies choose to focus on in order to drive their business forward, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that they’re also among the fastest growing. A recent report outlines some of the most important changes we can expect to see this year when it comes to workplace learning trends. Those include the rise in AI and machine learning, but also the importance of reskilling and upskilling your workforce.

In this article, we’ll provide our take on some of these predictions, what their importance for business management might be and how much of an impact they’re likely to have on the way we do our jobs and manage our employees. In addition to this, we’ll also discuss the value of finding the best tracking software as a simple yet helpful tool for staying up to date with all these new developments.

AI, Machine Learning and RPA

All three of these concepts - artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation - have been all the craze in 2019. The new trend in 2020 is likely to be the transition of these technologies into the mainstream. It’s not just software development companies, but businesses from all industries need to be prepared to immerse themselves into these sophisticated technologies.

What machine learning, AI and RPA all have in common is that they’ll all play a huge role in automating certain business tasks and processing a lot of valuable data that will in turn help optimize the way you run your company and turn profit.

Let’s take the example of robotic process automation in particular to illustrate how important these developments can prove to be for businesses. This technology basically takes any menial, repetitive and data-based task, analyzes the steps your employees take to complete it, and, by doing that, learns how to perform the task on its own.

As we’ve indicated at the beginning, some of the best tracking software can work great with RPA by providing the basis for the task learning path. The time tracker can isolate data on which tools an employee uses when doing that kind of task, in which order and how much time each step takes.

Once RPA program learns how to perform a specific action, your knowledge worker will spend less time tangled in menial tasks, and more time bringing innovation and creativity to your company, or facing clients and contributing to building a good business reputation.

Data-Driven Workplace

The time when all the changes to business strategies and development in general were done based in a huge part on intuition, guesswork or trial and error are long behind us. The trend of making all business decisions based on hard data will probably just become more prevalent as the method of improving processes and developing your company.

Therefore, finding the best tracking software will have a big role to play in all of this. The number of different sorts of data that this kind of app can give you is too large to dwell on for too long in this article, but we will give a couple of examples. The fact that one of the best tracking software use cases is for recording attendance based on computer activity ties back to automaticity that we’ve been mentioning. This data can help HR departments keep a cleaner and more accurate record of everyone’s attendance, including overtime, payroll, etc.

Another illustrative example of the future tendency to a more data-driven improvement strategy is process optimization. With the best tracking software as a part of your management practices, you can get huge amounts of data on how much time your employees spend on certain tasks, which tools they use, what they’re distracted by, when they’re most productive, etc. This can help you figure out how to organize projects, how to break them up into tasks, who to assign those tasks to, which tools are most efficient, and much more - all based on data.

Upskilling and Reskilling

The last trend in 2020 that we’re going to focus on here has a lot to do with learning and employee development in particular. It’s about upskilling and reskilling - another two buzz words, but for a good reason. In order to stay relevant in their industry, companies will have to place a great emphasis on getting, or rather enabling their workers to learn new skills and improve their existing ones. This is, in fact, one of the most highly regarded benefits that employees seek when looking for a job, so jumping on this bandwagon will also bring a little bit of extra employee job satisfaction and engagement.

Many of the best tracking software features, such as time on tasks or website use tracking, can be a good resource for pinpointing which areas you can help your employees develop and what skills they need improved. You might also choose to offer some conferences, courses or at least resources for those employees who want to learn new things, even if those are not necessarily directly connected to what their job is.

Popular new skills to learn are likely to be prominently related to technology, but not exclusively. Also, apart from the hard skills, soft skills are probably going to be even more in demand, such as for example communication skills, problem solving, team collaboration, negotiation, etc.

Conclusion

Judging by all of these developments in both machine and employee learning and decision making, it seems that an exciting year is ahead of us. There’s a lot to look forward to in the future of this data-driven and knowledge-based business world. The only thing left to do is prepare for the upcoming change and embrace all the good things that this year has in store for us.

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