Anywhere, Anytime

Abstract

In "the old days," over 20 years of schooling during the early part of one's life provided sufficient human capital investment to secure a lifelong career, perhaps at times reinforced by intermittent on-the-job training. But today, with the Fourth Industrial Revolution disrupting secure careers and drastically shortening the shelf life of skills to just 4.5 years, there is a need to continuously reskill and upskill throughout one's career. For development professionals—whether working in public policy institutions or international organizations, the growing interconnectedness of our world increasingly necessitates learning in ways that reconcile knowledge from different domains, such as energy, transport, and urban planning, as well from instruments and tools, such as stakeholder engagement, project management, and evaluation, and so on. The reorganization of the World Bank into Global Practices in 2014 and its associated mandate to "break knowledge silos," combined with the continued decentralization of staff and the growing interest to collaborate and co-create solutions with client teams, offered a fitting context for launching the Open Learning Campus (OLC), a platform that radically transformed the way the World Bank delivers learning to clients and staff. This chapter explains concepts and practices around the Open Learning Campus and how they supported the change management goals associated with the 2015 reorganization, concluding with an account of the track-record and uptake of "going virtual."