Aside from technological advances, there is also a series of geopolitical and macroeconomic movements and mobilizations that make us live in faster times. The big challenge is to keep up with this acceleration, adapting training so that companies can have the agility to cope with constant changes, rethinking organizational structures to be more flexible, more agile, and rethink the product and business generation cycle, which has an unprecedented impact on financial structures, teams, planning, and long and short term strategy. Professionals are also required to be constantly up to date to ensure this flexibility and readaptation.
The training that was required yesterday now needs to be developed throughout life. Diplomas and certifications may even come to have an expiry date because for the skills we acquire to be effective today, they must be permanently updated.
At Nova SBE, we work in this sense of lifelong learning, and, for us, there is a central component in the development of professionals: the ability to learn how to learn in a process that happens cyclically.
In this sense, it is important to understand whether we want to acquire skills or update them according to the designs of the organizations where we work and our professional aspirations. Suppose we only need to update the skills we already have. In that case, we can opt for more intensive, short-term programs, which can be done in a more flexible way: these include intensive courses, participation in events and conferences, short apprenticeships, and online workshops.
However, some skills are essential to almost any job. Nowadays, most companies revolve around the axis of digitalization and innovation, which dictates that they become transversal skills for almost all employees. When we need to acquire skills instead of updating, it is necessary to invest more time and resources. Therefore, at Nova SBE, we have created several medium-duration programs, including Postgraduate and Executive Master's. To adopt new skills, it is important to be able to apply them in practice, so all our courses have this component. Our five Executive Masters even allow students to use their final project to address a problem in their own companies or a dilemma in one of our partner organizations.
It is, however, important to underline that the evolution of each employee no longer goes only through the company. It is up to us to take care of their professional development agenda. Today, more than ever, there is an individual protagonism that involves strengthening skills to remain relevant in the labor market, embarking on this journey to do more and better throughout life.
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This article is a republication of a text published in the magazine Aprender Magazine - see the original here.
