The Need for Continuous Learning (Peter Drucker, 1994)

It never ends. There is always the next new thing to learn.  And not just the next new thing, but, in reality, the new world — the whole new landscape, the changing approach, to work itself.  “The old has gone, the new” keeps coming…

Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker, who coined the phrase the “knowledge worker” in his 1959 book Landmarks of Tomorrow, wrote this in his 1994 essay: The Age of Social Transformation:

The great majority of the new jobs require qualifications the industrial worker does not possess and is poorly equipped to acquire.  They require a good deal of formal education and the ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytical knowledge.  They require a different approach to work and a different mind-set.  Above all, they require a habit of continuous learning.  Displaced industrial workers thus cannot simply move into knowledge work or services the way displaced farmers and domestic workers (the dominant jobs at the turn of the last century – R.M) moved into industrial work.  At the very least they have to change their basic attitudes, values, and beliefs.