The Future of Workforce Development—Old Wine in New Bottles?

In recent years organisations have been compelled to adopt an expanding range of workplace education and training activities in order to remain competitive and survive. Developing people to gain, maintain and obtain new employment, sometimes called employability, has become accepted practice and part of the human resource practitioners’ narrative. However, the language we use to describe these learning events has changed from one decade to the next—largely in response to adjustments in vocational education policy, developments in society and evolutions in the nature of work. Workforce development is the latest label in a long line of professional titles given to workplace education and training activities and in this chapter we attempt to discover whether the current vocabulary reflects a surge in innovation or is simply a case of putting old wine into new bottles. In this final chapter we identify a selection of important findings from each section and synthesise them into a concept model of ten topics arranged in three broad themes of environment, place and people. We conclude as a consequence of these emerging issues that the strategies and workforce development practices deployed by organisations in the future will become much less predictable than previous generations, more diverse and challenging for upcoming HRD professionals.