the topic of digital transformation in education has faded into the background – Kommersant

Priorities in the market for corporate training for executives of large companies have changed, said Denis Konanchuk, director of the corporate training department at the Skolkovo School of Management, at conferences, organized by Kommersant. According to him, if in the spring of 2020, with the start of lockdowns, the topic of digital transformation came into first place by a large margin, now the main priority is leadership and organizational transformation.

“Before the pandemic and during the pandemic, the main flagship topic was digital transformation for most companies. 75% of our companies studied on this topic. Now we see that the demand for “digital” has gone away, the main topic is leadership and organizational transformation. The companies that work with us are thinking about how to make teams and leaders more resilient. There are other topics: operational efficiency, new markets and clients, but they are still growing,” said Mr. Konanchuk.

Answering the question about whether corporate universities are facing a shortage of certain personnel, the expert noted that the current situation is an excellent challenge for the professors of business schools and universities, since at present any theoretical knowledge temporarily ceases to work. “If before the pandemic some foreign professor came to us and showed us an Alibaba case from five years ago, then everyone perceived it normally. During the pandemic, cases older than two years stopped working, and since 2022 we see that people are not ready to listen to cases with a non-Russian context. Now they don’t want to hear about success stories. Everyone wants unsuccessful cases, not about the past, but about the present, and preferably about the future. Professors, especially if they are theoretical, cannot answer such requests. Companies are running faster than business schools, but this is a temporary situation,” he explained.

As before wrote “Kommersant”, in 2023, Russian companies, amid a shortage of personnel, were forced to invest in training their employees. The priority is training staff in digital skills, primarily about working with new technologies (including neural networks) and the basics of cybersecurity. The most effective formats were “long” courses and webinars with homework (55%), workshops and intensive courses (also 55%). In third place in popularity were strategy sessions (51% of respondents), offline training (47%) and microlearning (41%).