Earlier this week, I received a head’s up from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, an important resource for knowledge leadership co-founded by John Hagel and Jon Katzenbach. Here is their introduction to a report that I have just read and now highly recommend.

Cover image: Maria Corte Maidagan

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What is the useful life of most workplace skills today? Would you believe only five years? Your consumers are more powerful and less loyal, and so are your best workers. There’s an ever-growing need for talent to address skills gaps, and employee engagement is no longer enough.

So, how can organizations develop capabilities in the workforce to constantly learn and accelerate performance improvement?

Our new report, Unlocking the Passion of the Explorer, draws from a Deloitte Center for the Edge survey of 3,000 U.S. workers across industries and job levels, and uncovers that worker passion–rather than static skills–is critical as we shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning. A passionate worker demonstrates three specific attributes that we call the “passion of the Explorer”: Questing, Connecting, and Commitment to Domain. Explorers embrace challenges as opportunities to learn new skills and rapidly improve. They connect with others in a broad ecosystem to help solve problems. They aspire to have an impact in a chosen domain or industry.

Please click here to check out the report, part 1 in the 2013 Shift Index series, to learn more about how workers with the right passion can help companies navigate the rapidly changing world and how leaders can foster these passionate dispositions through the work environment.

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About the Shift Index

“We developed the Shift Index to help executives understand and take advantage of the long-term forces of change shaping the US economy. The Shift Index tracks 25 metrics across more than 40 years. These metrics fall into three areas: 1) the developments in the technological and political foundations underlying market changes, 2) the flows of capital, information, and talent changing the business landscape, and 3) the impacts of these changes on competition, volatility, and performance across industries. Combined, these factors reflect what we call the Big Shift in the global business environment. For more information, please click here.”