Draft:Josh Bersin

Josh Bersin (born 1956) is an American HR industry analyst, speaker, and published author in the areas of human resources, technology, learning, and organizational leadership. His work centers on the need to improve employee engagement and experience and support the CHRO to be more effective at their job.

A firm believer in the strategic role of human resources, Bersin is one of the profession’s most vocal advocates for the importance of HR in the ever-changing world of work. He is credited with inventing now-commonly accepted core workplace concepts like "learning in the flow of work," and "The Big Reset."

Early life
Bersin was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father was an MIT physicist who pioneered the development of plasma processing in semiconductors and his mother was a homemaker and successful salesperson in art, fashion, and real estate. He attended Cornell University and Stanford University where he achieved a BS, 1978 and MS, 1982 in engineering respectively). Bersin graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 with an MBA.

Career
Bersin’s early work career spanned many areas including product development, marketing and enterprise technology sales. This included stints at IT vendors like database leader Sybase and IBM, as well as in the field of e-learning.

Bersin has stated that he believes his experience of “jumping around and trying new things and learning on the fly” was critical to his growing conviction that HR was the market he needed to commit to.

These business experiences, as well as his analytical skills and insights into practical management in the modern U.S. corporation, inspired him to launch Bersin Associates in 2001 — one of the first truly specialized HR advisory firms.

Bersin Associates established a name for credible and in-depth guidance for business leaders and HR tech vendors in Learning & Development, Talent Management and Leadership. Once established, Bersin sold the firm to Deloitte in 2012, where the name was changed to Bersin by Deloitte™.

In 2019, Bersin migrated to other projects, founding the research and analyst firm The Josh Bersin Company and The Josh Bersin Academy, a global development academy for HR and talent professionals at all levels and across all industries.

Bersin is a prolific and closely-followed blogger and podcaster with more than 860,000 followers on LinkedIn. He has written a column for Forbes : currently, he writes a column for MIT Sloan Management Review and for other professional industry publications.

Finally, he is the author of The Blended Learning Book and The Training Measurement Book. His latest book, Irresistible: The Seven Secrets Of The World’s Most Enduring, Employee-Focused Organizations, is a 2022 BIBA® Non-Fiction: Business Management winner.