For years, organisations have approached learning and development as if the future were reasonably predictable.

They identified the skills required for each role, assessed where people fell short, and created courses to close the gaps. They decided which employees had potential, placed them on development programmes and prepared them for the next job in the hierarchy.

It was never a perfect system, but it made sense when organisations, roles and skills changed relatively slowly.

Does it still make sense now?

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 39 per cent of workers’ existing skills will be transformed or become outdated by 2030. It also predicts considerable growth in demand for AI, data and technological skills. But technical knowledge is only part of the answer. Creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, curiosity and lifelong learning are also becoming more important.  This creates an obvious problem for learning and development.

If we do not know what many jobs will look like in three years, how can we know which skills people will need? If AI takes over some of the tasks that people currently perform, are we developing them for the job they will have, or the job they are about to lose?

My answer is that learning and development is not a waste of time. But a great deal of what currently passes for learning and development may be.

We have been developing people for jobs, not for change.  Traditional development begins with the role.  What does a finance director, operations manager or head of marketing need to know?  The organisation then builds a competency framework and provides training against it.The difficulty is that jobs are becoming less stable collections of responsibilities.

AI will not necessarily remove an entire role. It may remove some tasks, accelerate others and create completely new responsibilities. A manager may need fewer people producing information and more ability to judge the quality of an AI generated answer. A technical expert may spend less time creating the work and more time explaining, challenging and applying it. A leader may need to redesign the organisation while continuing to deliver today’s results.The job description can no longer be the fixed point around which development is organised.

The better question is not, “What training does this person need for their next role?”

It is, “What will enable this person to remain useful as their role changes?”

Develop capabilities that survive changes in technology

Some technical skills will remain essential. People need enough understanding of AI, data and digital systems to work with them intelligently. An executive does not need to become a data scientist, but they must understand enough to ask sensible questions, recognise risk and avoid approving an AI project they do not understand.

Technical training, however, has a shorter useful life than it once did. By the time a comprehensive course has been designed, approved and delivered, the technology may have moved on.

This means organisations need to provide learning much closer to the point of need. People should learn through real problems, live projects and practical experimentation. The learning should be applied immediately, while it is still relevant.

At the same time, organisations need to invest more seriously in capabilities that remain valuable as specific skills change.

These include judgement, curiosity, adaptability, critical thinking and the ability to work with people whose expertise is different from your own. Leaders will need to make decisions when information is incomplete, challenge apparently authoritative answers and help people through changes that they cannot fully predict.

These are sometimes dismissed as soft skills. There is nothing soft about them. They are becoming the foundations of organisational performance.

What happens to succession planning?

Succession planning faces the same problem.

Most succession plans begin with a chart of important positions. For each position, the organisation identifies one or two people who might be ready to take over, usually within a stated number of years. But what if the role changes fundamentally before the successor arrives?

Preparing someone to replicate the current leader may be precisely the wrong development goal. The organisation may need a different kind of leader, a different combination of capabilities, or no equivalent role at all.

Succession planning must move away from replacing named people in fixed jobs. It should focus more on building pools of people who can take on different forms of responsibility as the organisation changes.

Potential should not mean looking like the current leadership team. It should mean having the capacity to learn, exercise judgement, work across boundaries and lead through uncertainty.

Nor should succession be reviewed once a year and then filed away. It needs to become a continuing conversation about strategy, organisational capability and risk. What is changing in the business? Which responsibilities are becoming more important? Where are we dependent on one person? Who has shown that they can grow when placed in an unfamiliar situation?

The best test of potential is not a rating on a talent grid. It is what someone does when given a problem for which there is no established answer.

The purpose of development has changed

The purpose of learning and development can no longer be to prepare people for a predictable next step.

It must help them perform now, adapt quickly and remain useful as the work changes around them.

That requires shorter learning cycles, more experimentation and much closer contact between learning, strategy and the real work of the organisation. It also requires leaders to stop treating development as something that happens on a course.

People develop when they are given unfamiliar responsibilities, allowed to make decisions, exposed to different parts of the business and encouraged to reflect honestly on what worked. They develop when their managers take the time to challenge their thinking rather than simply correcting their answers.

So, is learning and development a waste of time?  No.  But developing people for yesterday’s organisation almost certainly is.

The organisations that succeed will not be those that correctly predict every skill they will need. That is impossible.

They will be the ones that create people, leaders and cultures capable of learning faster than the world around them is changing.