As stewards of your company’s value, you need to understand how to get your people ready—not because it’s a nice thing to do but because the competitive advantage of early adopters of advanced algorithms and robotics will rapidly diminish. Simply put, companies will differentiate themselves not just by having the tools but by how their people interact with those tools and make the complex decisions that they must make in the course of doing their work. The greater the use of information-rich tools, the more important the decisions are that are still made by people. That, in turn, increases the importance of continuous learning. Workers, managers, and executives need to keep up with the machines and be able to interpret their results. – Putting Lifelong Learning on the Agenda,McKinsey Insights

Here’s a company that’s living that advice:

“The future of learning sabbaticals at Buffer is closely tied with our desire to help create the future of work. There’s a quote from Stephanie Ricci, head of learning at AXA that’s really powerful in explaining how much impact learning will have for employees in the future:

“By 2020, the core skills required by jobs are not on the radar today, hence we need to rethink the development of skills, with 50% of our jobs requiring significant change in terms of skillset”

That is a huge amount of jobs that will require new skills and for organizations and workers that means a lot of learning and developing.”

– Why this company implemented a learning sabbatical for its employees, FastCo