Will Human Resource Development Become Too Important To Be Left to Human Resource Development Professionals? Employees and Managers as Strategic Human Resource Development Stakeholders

Abstract

Now thatHuman Resource Development Review has celebrated its 20 anniversary, the question almost naturally arises what the field it covers will look like in another decade. Obviously, the future is notoriously difficult to predict; however, I’d like to use this editorial to speculate about the directions that Human Resource Development (HRD) as a field of practice and scholarship might take. Which themes could dominate the HRD discipline in 2032? I will also elaborate in this editorial on one of the themes I expect to become even more salient within HRD than it already is: the role of employees and managers in organizing learning. As it happens, at the time of writing this piece on Christmas Eve of 2021, my colleague Joseph Kessels and I have just published a co-edited Dutch-language HRD handbook (Poell & Kessels, 2021), in which we also look ahead to the not-too-distant