Careers have a meaning beyond any one organization. They’re part of our social fabric. But somewhere along the way, the assumptions and expectations of employers and employees started to fracture. And sadly, today, most people in most organizations cannot see a clear future for their career.

It’s time for a new generation of careers—and a new compact—built on what we call career clarity. Instead of traditional career ladders, the new era of the career must come from the commitment to map out skill needs, and then to reward corresponding skill development and growth in return.

By deconstructing “institutional knowledge” into a discreet, knowable set of skills, we gain a less ambiguous and more flexible formula for career growth, a new lever for managing teams, and a more practical basis for training. We also gain a new map of capabilities that’s not bound to perpetually obsolete job descriptions and org charts.

As organizations provide this kind of skill-based clarity to employees, along with a paved path to build new skills, the next era of the career will be understood in terms of skill mastery and learning-based hierarchies. Capability for learning, and for inspiring learning culture, will become core to leadership.

As the new career compact is rooted in perpetual learning, job descriptions will evolve into detailed learning pathways, employees are empowered to continually adapt and align their skills with what organizations need.

As organizations provide this kind of skill-based clarity to employees, along with a paved path to build new skills, the next era of the career will be understood in terms of skill mastery and learning-based hierarchies. Capability for learning, and for inspiring learning culture, will become core to leadership.

As the new career compact is rooted in perpetual learning, job descriptions will evolve into detailed learning pathways, employees are empowered to continually adapt and align their skills with what organizations need.

Before we can realize the future of L&D, we first need to reckon with the broken assumptions that have limited our field for decades. As the importance of learning grew in the last 25 years, teams everywhere were sold on generic, pre-packaged training content, with LMS providers competing on absurd vanity metrics like the scale of their content libraries.

It would be an attractive idea—if it worked—and we need tools to manage content. But the proposition to conveniently bypass the effort of contending with the unique needs of each organization, how those needs translate into skill requirements, and how this specific training can be provided is a fantasy. No other critical function can be outsourced and commoditized in this way.

Worst of all, in reaction to these flawed ideas, employees have developed a deep cynicism and skepticism of learning and training programs, seeing all of this generic content as obviously worthless and irrelevant to their personal success, or merely required for liability reasons.

In response to the limitations of this “one-library-fits-everyone” approach, LMS providers started to explore skills “add ons” that could potentially improve relevancy within this sea of commodity content. But starting with a library of content and then trying to identify skill needs is fundamentally backwards.

Ultimately, learning and development teams deserve solutions that are more than an afterthought. Like a supply chain or a product vision, learning and training cannot be seen as stock and interchangeable. It must be treated as part of the lifeblood of success—like sales, engineering, or manufacturing—as a primary driver of success.

If the capacity for learning and training will determine the success and failure of our organizations, it becomes critical to confront the disconnect between HR and L&D.

HR and People teams are trapped in a perpetual cycle of personnel issues: PTO logistics, payroll processing, policy enforcement, performance management, review cycles, recruiting, compensation management, compliance…the list goes on.

And beyond the mountain of obligations that these teams face, HR-led skills initiatives have been severely limited by HRIS and HCM tools, which are designed primarily for centralized record keeping and administrative tracking, not for driving daily end-user engagement in nuanced learning programs; a fundamental mismatch of purpose.

Despite the best of intentions, the sad fact is that HRIS-powered skills initiatives are largely dead-on-arrival, which can further feed employee cynicism about learning programs.

Thankfully a new kind of partnership is forming between HR and L&D functions. One where HR teams are provided with all essential skill, certification, and training records by default, and where L&D teams are empowered to use their own primary tools and techniques that can make learning culture a reality.

With a new top-down mandate for learning and training, L&D teams need to execute careful strategies for building credibility and trust across our organizations. The ideal approach will focus on three areas.

First, the thoughtful decomposition of job families and functions into logical, manageable skill and competency groups, for whom success profiles can be developed.

Next, determination of the right learning and training models for each function. For example, for frontline staff, concrete skill-based training pathways paired with 1-1 coaching by experts can be highly effective, which bypasses the challenges of “classroom learning” that Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem highlights.

For engineering teams, competency programs that focus on a combination of expert frameworks and engineering principles, technical skill surveys, and targeted mentorship models oriented to each person’s “zone of proximal development” are recommended.

For sales teams, applied learning is preferred, where skills profiles align directly with the actual business model, sales motions, and buying stages of your end clients, with a library of real world examples of success and failure curated back to specific skill pathways.

Finally, first class tools must be selected that support the full nuance of each of these pedagogical models, and that are designed to genuinely engage end-users in long term learning journeys. In its highest form, learning culture will thrive via many simultaneous models within any given organization, and each must be developed and cultivated. But through embracing these ideas, when organizations genuinely invest in and reward learning, and promote people who achieve meaningful skill growth, enormous new capacity can be achieved.

At SkillsDB, our mission is to make learning culture universal, and our perspective informs every project and learning program we support.