The future of jobs and work
In the 21st century, a veritable smorgasbord of change is driving jobs and work in new directions.
- Globalisation
- Escalating technological innovation
- The flattening of organisational hierarchies
- Increasing use of teams
- Internationalisation
- Rising numbers of temporary and contract workers
The list could go on and on. But a key fact among all the change is that jobs and work are being transformed at unprecedented rates.
The speed of technology diffusion has increased significantly. New kinds of collaborative technology and collaborative platforms seem to be appearing all the time. The worldwide shortage of skilled knowledge workers is becoming more severe. And more examples of real-world experiments in shared work environments and distributed work programs are regularly coming on stream.
 |
The global competition between different countries is leading whole industries to migrate. Dramatic changes are happening to terms of employment. |
The concept of a ‘lifelong job’ has disappeared. Increasingly, the individual needs to take personal responsibility for his or her own job and career.
The new economy is here – hold on tight
Work is no longer as it used to be. The impact of technology, communication and knowledge has resulted in the rise of the new economy. And what are the pillars of the new economy? Essentially, the undeniable drivers are: knowledge, creativity and innovation.
Forces that will shape future jobs and work will include the need for companies, organisations and institutions to be flexible and nimble to meet the challenges head-on. Flexibility will be extreme by today’s standards. Things will be done, and undone, at breakneck speed. Information will be available more rapidly, therefore decisions will be faster than ever before. Challenges will include chaotic markets which will move with complete unpredictability. Resources and supplies will be equally unpredictable.
In big companies, people willing to take carefully evaluated risks and those having an entrepreneurial spirit, will be sought to maintain competitiveness in a global turbulent world.
Big changes for the individual
Central to the future of jobs and work is the growing importance of individual development. Training and learning can no longer be viewed as a need that occurs when a new system is introduced or when a new job is begun.
Personal development will to be viewed as a continuous process to meet tomorrow’s challenges. Training programs will continue to be an important but because of constant changes in work opportunities, individuals will need to manage their own development. People will need to regularly update and expand their skills to prepare for future job demands.
For employers, greater investment in training will mean that the selection process will become even more important. The selection of employees and retention of talent will become more complex as employers will demand the best and will be highly selective in their choice of candidates. In many businesses, there will be fewer people but a higher percentage of top people at ease in a chaotic world of work.
For roles requiring judgement and decision-making, recruitment of better-developed employees will be an imperative for the future. More and more, rote and mechanistic work, and work that can be substantially automated or digitised, will be consigned to low cost workforces, technology driven factories or service centres.
Apart from personal development and training, individuals will also face the issue of control of their work. There will be more control than ever before. Individual workers will have a large measure of control over where, when, and what they do to produce value.
As the future gets closer, employees will have more opportunities to determine what they do, when they do it, where they do it, and – most importantly – how they do it.
The old work style involved going to a corporate office because that’s where all the relevant files were kept. There were company resources, there and that’s where meetings took place. In the future, that sort of work style will be less and less visible.
For knowledge workers especially, in the future there will be more blurring of the boundaries between professional and personal lives. With greater personal autonomy, workers will be more likely to take their PDA’s and other hand held technology with them wherever they go.
Equally, because they can keep in touch, there will be no problem about visiting a friend in hospital or picking up a child from school during the traditional working day. An individual may do his most important work after 10 pm or before 7 am, because it suits him or because he can communicate most conveniently with an associate in another time zone.
In the years ahead, knowledge workers will absolutely take control of their work and non-work life.
As a result of all this, there will be significant changes for managers. After all, it will be a very different challenge, managing a worker with so much mobility, flexibility and autonomy. A different type of person with a different skill set will be required for managing. And such people will have to be identified and carefully selected. Obviously, where there is more freedom among employees, the whole area of selection will become that much more critical.
Globalisation impacting careers
In the decades ahead, the movement of goods, services, ideas and people around the world will get progressively easier and more prevalent than ever before. Ignoring globalisation as part of managing career advancement will be fatal and will severely curtail career opportunities for individuals.
- Globalisation is more than just business - it is about culture and people.
- Globalisation is about having an international network of contacts and friends.
- Globalisation is a process rather than a fact or structure.
In the context of developing a career, each person will need to take his or her fate firmly in hand. While employers will sometimes create opportunities, individuals will need to turn to coaches and mentors for help. Every individual will have to put more emphasis on making himself or herself more employable.
Adjusting attitudes to work and jobs
Attitudes to work and jobs will have to substantially change during the decades ahead. Employees can no longer think in terms of simply being a worker earning a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. Employers will increasingly demand that individuals think and work entrepreneurially. Individuals will have to continuously keep asking themselves what makes them unique and enables them to make a difference in the workplace. They will have to learn to market themselves.
Understanding the business of the employer will be pivotal in enabling the business to make a profit. Today’s brilliant people from bureaucratic organisations may feel like ducks out of water in tomorrow’s organisations if they do not know the ABCs of profit-making and business continuity.
Working in an era of disruption, accepting false starts and working through mistakes will be part of the learning journey. This approach will be a critical shift in attitude for many individuals. Learning to celebrate a lesson learnt from failure, or a discovery that fizzles or goes up in flames when put to practical application, will be a new experience for many.
More mastery at work
As more work becomes team-based, the future for individuals will be about ‘selling’ themselves to project leaders. Employers will no longer be satisfied to be told that a person has the required knowledge. What they will be seeking, is higher levels of competency in every skill, for the purpose of maintaining the competitiveness of their business.
The pursuit of true mastery will be critical in adding specific economic value to the business where the individual works. Mastery will go beyond just having distinct skills. Individuals will need to be consummate professionals who work obsessively at their trade or craft. It will also be important to be able to thrive while uncertainty and ambiguity reign. Just as important as the ability to do one thing extremely well, so it will be essential to do a dozen things at once, and change course without hesitation.
Technology on the go
Technology and technological change will dominate the working landscape. Many individuals may be past their prime when it comes to understanding, learning and applying new technology. But they will have little choice. They will need to pick up new technology on the trot and apply it to their work. Employers will expect individuals to invest in their own training in new technology as it hits the market and seeps into work processes.
The pace of technological change — whether through advances in information technology, biotechnology, or such emerging fields as nanotechnology — will certainly accelerate through the next ten years. There will be greater synergies across technologies and disciplines. Such synergies will pave the way for further advances that will impact work and jobs in ways that are possibly unimagined right now.
In the whole area of IT, work methods are likely to be effected by advances in microprocessors leading to new opportunities in real-time speech recognition, translation and robotics. As more intelligent robotics are introduced into a wider spread of manufacturing, there will be shop floor implications for manufacturing, logistics and inventories. At the same time, technological advances will increase demand for a highly skilled workforce and add to the volume of change in workplaces.
Networks to get more important
Nurturing and developing ever widening networks of friends and contacts will be increasingly important if the individual hopes to thrive in tomorrow’s world. More than ever, information will reach individuals faster through personal networks.
For individuals past forty, it will be invaluable to be plugged into networks of the under forties. For the under forties, it will be equally important to be connected to the over forties. The under forties will generally bring with them technology, modern business ideas and processes while the over forties will bring with them know-how, experience and years of expertise.
Ongoing passion for self-renewal
A passion for constant self-renewal will be a ‘must’ in the future. Individuals will not only have to be passionate about the work they do, but also passionate about lifelong learning and permanent exploring of new knowledge and opportunities.
Taking risks, thinking critically and looking at things with new eyes will be essential in the future.
Reinventing themselves, individuals will need to be able to work independently and with others with minimal supervision. Equally, it will be important to be part of a wider community that embraces not only those in their immediate social and professional neighbourhood but also those who share similar interests globally.
For many individuals, learning to enjoy work and yet celebrate life concurrently in a highly turbulent world will be the biggest challenge in reinventing themselves.
Critical to embrace cultural intelligence
As the populations of many countries become more multicultural and multi-ethnic, there will be an increasing demand for cross cultural people skills. The demand for cultural intelligence and sensitivity will increasingly gain importance in the next decade as workforces become more culturally diverse. Cultural intelligence involves understanding the fundamentals of intercultural interaction, and developing a mindful approach to intercultural communication. As well, it involves building adaptive skills and a repertoire of behaviours so that an individual is effective in different intercultural situations.
As the world of work becomes more global and workforces become more international, individuals will not be able to ignore developing cultural intelligence for achieving career success.
The new design of workspace
With so many people working from their own facilities, maybe at home or on the road or elsewhere, the future of work and jobs will also see major changes to corporate office facilities.
The roles of architects and facilities managers will be radically redesigned. These professionals will not be focused on creating and managing space. Their emphasis will be more on enabling or facilitating work. Architects will approach their challenges from a different point of view – not primarily looking at space but primarily looking at work.
Just as with a house, every room is designed for a specific purpose – either as a kitchen, or bedroom or whatever, so offices will not be designed simply as open space. Rather each space will be designed to support specific work related activities. Specialists in Human Resources will have to be up with these changes in order to guide their organisations in choosing what’s best for them.
Conclusion
The future of jobs and work is exciting, new and challenging. It will be full of uncertainty and ambiguity. However, visualising the possibilities and preparing for them may help reduce anxiety.
Those individuals who will best cope with work in the future, will be those who make a concerted effort to change. And what precisely do they need to change? Most importantly, for embracing the future, it will be essential to change attitudes and behaviours, to engage in self-directed learning and to recognise adult development as a livelong endeavour. All this will be needed to meet the tsunami of changes ahead, and all that the vagaries of economic turbulence will introduce.
