Skill Development for a Complex World
At the Learning Technologies Autumn Forum, online this October, Julie Dirksen will explore how learning professionals can design for skill development in a world shaped by both AI and complexity.
AI is transforming how we think about skills and skill development, but one thing remains clear: people still need deep skills and expertise. Those capabilities are essential not only for evaluating AI-generated outputs, but also for navigating work that is increasingly complex, changeable, and uncertain.
At the same time, the nature of expertise itself is shifting. As AI takes on more aspects of original creation, human capability is increasingly defined by the ability to scrutinise, evaluate, adapt, and make sound judgments. That shift has important implications for learning design. If the skills people need are changing, the experiences we create to build those skills must change as well.
In this session, Julie Dirksen will explore how learning professionals can design for skill development in a world shaped by both AI and complexity. She will examine how different types of complexity affect learning design, what expertise still matters most, and how practice can help people build the judgment, adaptability, and ownership needed for expert performance.
Key topics include:
- How different types of complexity influence learning design
- The skills and expertise people still need in an AI-supported workplace
- How changing definitions of expertise affect the learning experiences we design
- Designing practice that builds judgment, adaptability, and expert performance
- Helping learners take greater ownership of their own expertise development
"Skill Development for a Complex World" takes place at the LTAF 2026 online event on Thursday, October 15, 2026 13:30 to 14:30.
The Learning Technologies Autumn Forum takes place online on 13, 15, 20 and 22 October. The conference programme is available from the Learning Technologies Autumn Forum website.
Julie Dirksen, Learning Strategist, Usable Learning
Julie Dirksen is the author of one of the bestselling instructional design books, Design for How People Learn (over 100,000 copies sold), Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change, and her new book, Design for How People Build Skills.