As AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson re-
cently shared, “Your skill set is two years in
duration – max.” Meaning that not only will
agility and adaptability serve as vital skill-
sets for the future, it is also foreshadows the
extreme importance of learnability and how
it will play a vital role in the lives of our in-
dividuals and organizations in moving more
relevantly into this very non-obvious future
we are facing.
As World Economic Forum states, “Up to
65% of the jobs Generation Z will perform
don’t even exist yet and up to 45% of the
activities people are paid to perform today
could be automated using current technol-
ogy.” For which WEF includes, “In this
environment, learnability – the desire and
capability to develop in-demand skills to
be employable for the long-term – is the hot
ticket to success for employers and individu-
als alike.”
ManpowerGroup Chairman & CEO
Jonas Prising adds, “In this Skills Revo-
lution, learnability – the desire and abil-
ity to learn new skills to stay relevant and
remain employable – will be the great
equalizer.”
While we have always approached the
idea of being a life-long learner as important
for leaders in the past, we are finding that it
is becoming imperative for the future. As a
leader, your Learnability Quotient may de-
fine your Relevancy Quotient for the future.
As Ray Carvey, executive vice president of
corporate learning at Harvard Business
Publishing shares that “cultivating learning
agility” serves as one of the eight leadership
skills that Harvard thinks you need for this
exponentially changing future. As he shares,
“Effective leaders will take the initiative in
finding opportunities to learn.”
So, no longer is being a life-long learner
enough in today’s fast-changing, VUCA
environments. Today’s leaders not only
need to equip themselves with a learnability
skillset, they need the initiative and aware-
ness of how and where to access learning
most relevant to their needs and their ongo-
ing leadership journey.
In many ways, today’s educators have to
not only take initiative, they have to take
control of their own ongoing learning.
Which is why many of today’s forward
Educational chats on
Twitter not only expand
opportunities to initiate
leadership learnability
through the sharing and
gaining of knowledge,
they afford us the
opportunity to build
up and curate our own
Professional Learning
Networks.
thinking leaders see social media plat-
forms, such as Twitter, not as a place to
share their favorite dish from lunch, but as
a 24-7 global space to access on-demand
learning on a local and global scale. In
fact, Twitter is becoming a vital space for
educators to share stories, strategies, ideas,
knowledge and new thinking. As Katrina
Stevens shares in EdSurge, “Out of the 1-2
billion tweets that post every day, 4.2 mil-
lion are related to education, according to
Brett Baker, an account executive on Twit-
ter.com.” For which Brett Baker adds that
their, “small education team has begun
collecting stories about how educators are
using Twitter to see if there are ways Twit-
ter can support educators more.”
Twitter not only provides a place for
educators and leaders to access on-demand
learning, it also provides a space for them
to cognitively connect, share stories, strat-
egies, new learning and knowledge. It also
provides an arena for engaging relevant and
ongoing conversations around education and
educational leadership through educational
chats. Educational chats that are so numer-
ous, that the variety, times and days of these
chats are almost endless in their depth and
breadth across the Twitter-sphere.
There are chats sponsored by organiza-
tions such as Solution Tree (#atplc), ACSA
(#edequity), and CUE (#cuechat). There
are chats for superintendents (#suptchat),
principals (#cpchat), general education
(#edchat), as well as for kindergarten
teachers (#kinderchat) and new teachers
(#ncchat). There are regional chats for ex-
ample we have (#caedchat) for California.
There are even topical chats such as Teach
Like a Pirate chat (#tlap). In fact, there are
too many chats to keep up with. But have
no fear, a simple search can result in lists
that have been created that provide the
variety of chats, listed by time zone, topic,
times, and days.
These educational chats not only give
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