What’s ‘FOBO’? And why are so many workers afraid of it?
“What I worry about is that the employers are going to really put the onus on the workers and not take as much responsibility as they should or need to,” she said.
Stanton was less certain employers will move quickly.
“In the interim, there is going to be the onus on workers to do a lot of self-learning and to figure things out,” he said. But he warned that companies betting on workers to close their own shortfalls could pay a real price.
“My guess is the companies that don’t actually get out ahead of these investments in training are likely to fall behind,” Stanton said. He added that the assumption behind many recent job cuts, that AI plus a leaner, self-upskilled workforce could cover the same work, “probably hasn’t played out in the way that many of the executives who made those decisions to cut thought they would.”
Stanton’s advice for learning and development leaders is to use AI tools directly, rather than only choosing a vendor’s curriculum. He said most L&D organizations still set up a learning management system and pick a vendor, when the same AI tools reshaping jobs are now capable of building and updating training material in-house, on a timeline that can actually keep up.
