Error Occurrence: Successful versus Unsuccessful Unlearning in Individuals

Previously, a worker may have been able to learn a set of skills that would last during his occupational lifetime. However, the need for constant skill changes in today´s environment has created difficulties for individuals who must unlearn, store and use knowledge in a new process to update the old. As knowledge grows exponentially, today´s workers must keep pace with changes. Industry advancements create need for unlearning old competencies. Without changes to maintain competency, the amount of wasted time, additional energy and resources required will continue to increase at an alarming rate. To reduce these impacts, systemic change through individual unlearning is necessary. The challenge is to develop and implement new knowledge. However, the literature regarding the unlearning process and its relationship to knowledge management has not been conceptualized. Confusion regarding the concept of unlearning remains a persistent problem because a clear definition at either the organizational or individual level does not exist. A recommendation for study of open problems may attempt to: 1) investigate and collect descriptive characteristics of individual unlearning; 2) develop and propose a clear definition of individual unlearning; 3) examine the collected characteristics to determine which characteristics contribute to unsuccessful individual unlearning.