Today, only a small percentage of businesses do an adequate job of building and updating the skills of their personnel to meet the changing needs of the marketplace. Part of the reason is that educational institutions and corporations of the 21st century are still locked into a training paradigm from the 19th and early 20th centuries. What are the implications of this current situation? What needs to be done to assure individual, corporate, and national success in the years ahead? We'll provide the answers.

Recent studies show that the “skills gap” the Trends editors previously forecasted is already impeding our economic progress and will only get worse as the economy recovers. In fact, it’s playing a significant role in “America’s Innovation Crisis” — a trend that we will also explore in this issue. Given the long development cycle for new talent, what is the solution? We’ll examine the facts and the most realistic possibilities.