Filipe Carrera is a trainer with extensive experience in the business and academic world. He is a professor in several universities and the author of four books about digital communication. During MERIT Summit 2018 Filipe will help us envision the future of talent management and the role of executive education.

What is your main focus (your role) now?

My role is to bridge learning, networking, communication, work, and marketing with digital tools in a way that creates a much more effective and effortless experience of life and work in the 21st century.

I believe that most people acknowledge that we are living a moment of digital transformation, but there is a paradox: they are trying to lead a process without doing their own transformation.

What are you passionate about professionally?

I’m passionate about creating the conditions for positive change to happen; changing organisations and people so that they fulfil their vision and mission.

And the best part is that my work has taken me to more than 50 countries in four continents, giving me a global view of most of the challenges faced by organisations across the world and enabling me to share this experience.

What will be your role at the MERIT Summit?

It will be to connect with interesting people in the academic and business world, and to be a kind of “mind shaker”.

What do you think are some of the biggest challenges or issues for businesses?

In my view the biggest challenge for business in the 21st century is to survive in a world where size and track record are no longer a guarantee of a bright future.

To face this huge challenge Talent Management is becoming a key function in every organisation and because of that education and training will have to change dramatically.

What are the changes needed in education?

We cannot continue with a production model applied to education where the KPI are class hours, grades, or numbers of students, PhD holders or classrooms.

We have to return to the education model of ancient Greece, where the moments of contact with the masters were moments of highly interactive work and students had to prepare beforehand and continue the work afterwards.

Now, with digital technologies, the master can follow us wherever we are, in a way that was impossible before.

Millennials are starting to look for this change, and Generation Z will demand it. Those educational institutions and teachers that don’t prepare will fail for sure.

And in training?

Training will undergo a similar change to education, with another twist: it will be more and more connected with knowledge management, creating a just-in-time learning experience.

The speed of change in organisations will require people to be able to learn, unlearn, and relearn in order to keep up with the pace.

What are you looking forward to at the event?

I’m looking for opportunities to expand my activity as a speaker and as a teacher beyond the 50 countries that I already cover.

What is your interpretation on the main conference theme “Always-On Learning”?

Never in the history of mankind have we had so much knowledge accessible at the tips of our fingers. Mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, etc. give us the possibility to learn wherever we are and whenever we want.

To create an “Always-On Learning” environment, it is not enough to have the technology available. The biggest challenge is to change each individual's attitude towards education and training.

Like any big shift in behaviour, it will be a slow but steady process and at the end we will not be able to imagine how it was before – just like when we try to imagine a world without Google.