Enabling the Future of Work
IMPLICATIONS for L&D BY ALBERT SIU, PhD
If you work in the learning and development field, you know that the nature of work is changing and the competition for skilled talent is intense. The learning function must be strategic and accountable for all its actions to close skill gaps and meet the company’s emerging talent needs. As a clinical research organization (CRO) and global provider of biopharmaceutical services, Parexel has focused its attention on our changing workforce, training functions, and how learners are experiencing the training to meet everchanging business requirements.
SETTING L&D PRIORITIES Two years ago, Parexel collaborated with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) to study the impact of innovation on drug development. We noted that in the prior 10 years, drug development costs had doubled, and looking ahead to the next 20 to 30 years, costs might increase 10 times. Concurrently, the “time to market” in our industry—from identifying a compound that has clinical treatment possibilities to launching a new drug—is around 12 years, and the failure rate of these new inventions runs as high as 90%.
12 I AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020
The study dug into understanding the “why” of those findings and identified two broad drivers. The first is an inadequately trained workforce, and the second is the low adoption rate of innovative methodologies in clinical studies, which are hampered by organizational silos and risk-averse cultures. Parexel partners with our biopharmaceutical clients to remediate these gaps, and we have had many external discussions about the impending global skilled labor shortage. In clinical research, we need scientists and technicians who are well schooled in their respective disciplines and people who have strong foundational knowledge in the academic disciplines they pursue. We hen provide industry and functional skills and knowledge to our recruits to complement the strength of their foundational knowledge. For Parexel, three sources of information were seminal in influencing our thinking about enabling the future of work and the implications for L&D.
