To be successful, people need to be able to master skills quickly in a new field. In brief: to learn how to learn. The learning process is much more important than the content learned. The buzzwords of the times are complex problems' setting and solving, creativity and innovation, social skills and interpersonal communication, cross-cultural intelligence, flexibility - in terms of place, time and type of work.
Globalization, great migrations, international markets opening are some of the elements characterizing the societies in which we are living and that the training systems must square with. It's not possible to continue to offer knowledge in the traditional way anymore, and if the formative institutions (school and university first of all) will not adjust their methods of knowledge transmission, they will run the risk of being emarginated by the new infrastructures of knowledge production.
When it comes to companies and organizations, only in the last few years have the majority of executives started to consider knowledge and competences as strategic resources which should be managed in the same way as they manage economical income and outcome fluxes, personnel or natural resources. In the proximate future, managerial work will be characterized, more than today, by human and intellectual resources development: organizational knowledge creation, competences and abilities management and development in order to spread them inside/outside organizations and transform them into products, services and operative systems.

Barbara Bertagni, based in Paris, Turin and Lugano, is an executive educator, an anthropologist, an epistemologist and a clinical psychologist. Her professional areas are coaching, counseling, mentoring, personal and professional development, cross-cultural intelligence and practical philosophy. Founder and managing partner of LKN-Logos Knowledge Network.
Michele La Rosa, based in Bologna, is a professor of Sociology of work and of Sociology of Economics by the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Bologna. In the same university, he is also the president of the Sociology degree program and of the Occupation, market and ambient master program. He manages CIDOSPEL - The International Center for Documentation and Sociological Studies on Work Issues.
Fernando Salvetti is an executive educator, an anthropologist, a lawyer and an epistemologist based in Paris, Turin and Lugano. He is a founder and managing partner of LKN-Logos Knowledge Network, headquartered between Switzerland and the European Union. His professional areas are people development, cultural anthropology, cross-cultural intelligence and practical philosophy, epistemology and knowledge management.