If you don’t use it, you will lose it. Automate what was once a skill-developed process and those skills will decline.
One key factor in understanding how we learn and develop skills is that experience cannot be automated. Increasing automation requires that the Learning and Development (L&D) field must get out of the comfort zone of course development and into the most complex aspects of human learning and performance. To understand learning at work, L&D must understand the work systems. Now they also have to understand skill erosion.
Addressing skill erosion will be a great challenge because the entire capitalist economy seeks continuous automation in order to feed the ‘constant growth’ economic machine. “Thanks to accounting conventions and tax laws dating back centuries, a robot doesn’t need to be better – or more efficient – than a human being at a task to make a business more profitable. It just needs to be 34% as good, or 11% as good, depending on that business’s accounting and amortization policies.” —John Carolus Sharp
As more of our work systems become automated, there is less need for vigilant human oversight. But take the case of commercial aviation. Most aircraft fly most of the time on autopilot. What does this do to pilot concentration and skill erosion? Understanding these complex relations — between skilled humans and very complicated machines & software — requires systems thinking and a better approach to training.
Dave Cormier, author of Learning in a Time of Abundance, warned that learning basic skills will become auto-tuned from the likes of GPT, LLM, etc.
For the past two decades I have promoted manual sensemaking. It is the basis of my personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework. Sensemaking is a manual skill, which can be assisted with various tools, but the most important tool is our mind, using good practices, and learning with and from others.
Helen Blunden observed several years ago that PKM is a foundation for sensemaking in the modern, connected workplace. “The more I am out there chatting to clients, the more I realise that your PKM approach is the number one critical skill set. Any way I look at it, all roads seem to end there. It is the foundation. That’s why I thought this is where they need to start – and not just the employees – everyone including the managers.”
As the authors of The Vicious Circles of Skills Erosion, observe — burdensome tasks can be aided by automation systems but reliance on these can lead to individual complacency and organizational skill erosion.
Manual skills are human skills.
Image Source: Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Vol 24 (2023)
One key factor in understanding how we learn and develop skills is that experience cannot be automated. Increasing automation requires that the Learning and Development (L&D) field must get out of the comfort zone of course development and into the most complex aspects of human learning and performance. To understand learning at work, L&D must understand the work systems. Now they also have to understand skill erosion.
Addressing skill erosion will be a great challenge because the entire capitalist economy seeks continuous automation in order to feed the ‘constant growth’ economic machine. “Thanks to accounting conventions and tax laws dating back centuries, a robot doesn’t need to be better – or more efficient – than a human being at a task to make a business more profitable. It just needs to be 34% as good, or 11% as good, depending on that business’s accounting and amortization policies.” —John Carolus Sharp
As more of our work systems become automated, there is less need for vigilant human oversight. But take the case of commercial aviation. Most aircraft fly most of the time on autopilot. What does this do to pilot concentration and skill erosion? Understanding these complex relations — between skilled humans and very complicated machines & software — requires systems thinking and a better approach to training.
Dave Cormier, author of Learning in a Time of Abundance, warned that learning basic skills will become auto-tuned from the likes of GPT, LLM, etc.
For the past two decades I have promoted manual sensemaking. It is the basis of my personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework. Sensemaking is a manual skill, which can be assisted with various tools, but the most important tool is our mind, using good practices, and learning with and from others.
Helen Blunden observed several years ago that PKM is a foundation for sensemaking in the modern, connected workplace. “The more I am out there chatting to clients, the more I realise that your PKM approach is the number one critical skill set. Any way I look at it, all roads seem to end there. It is the foundation. That’s why I thought this is where they need to start – and not just the employees – everyone including the managers.”
As the authors of The Vicious Circles of Skills Erosion, observe — burdensome tasks can be aided by automation systems but reliance on these can lead to individual complacency and organizational skill erosion.
Manual skills are human skills.
Image Source: Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Vol 24 (2023)