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WFS Home The Futurist 2014 Issues of The Futurist November-December
2014 (Vol. 48, No. 6)
hours.
The workplace for any given job is likely to continue to spread over
multiple time zones or continents, with workers connecting through a growing
range of media channels.
the Collegiate Learning Assessment, rather than on just college grades and
degrees to assess candidates.
More than 75% of U.S. employees are almost continuously looking for
work while employed, and they hold nearly a dozen different jobs on average
before age 35.
And 30% of U.S. workers are on flextime when working from home (or
other locations) two to three days a week. As well, some studies have found
increased productivity of as much as 15%20% for these flextime workers.
Timothy C. Mack
More job openings are also expected for nurses, health-care technicians and
administrators, massage and yoga practitioners, car service and shoe repair
personnel, as well as retail salespeople, administrative aides, customer
relations, janitorial services, and teaching assistants.
The BLS expects that the fastest-growing job categories of all will include
organizational psychologists, interpreters, occupational therapists, and genetic
counselors. Finally, not surprisingly, the highest-paying jobs in the next decade
include very-high-skilled medical specialists: oral surgeons, obstetricians,
orthodontists, and pediatricians.
These projections are not at all surprising; in fact, they are rather similar to
those of past BLS reports. However, the depiction of job growth as a no
surprises straight line does not necessarily forecast what may actually happen
in the years ahead. While the fields of health and education have long been
economic bulwarks in both lean and prosperous times, new technologies are
rapidly being introduced in many sectors, especially those sectors where
industries are facing special challenges or undergoing dramatic change.
New tools will also be needed to cope with problems created by social and
professional fragmentation and dysfunction, such as navigation through
increasing complexity, improved pattern recognition, crisis resolution,
communications skills, self-directed learning, and cyberliteracy.
According to the MIT Sloan Management Review, no more than 10% of the
individuals in a typical organization or commercial enterprise today possess the
ability to look beyond existing rules and goals to create new directions.
Therefore, twenty-first-century managers seeking high-performing employees
will value:
Technological Unemployment
While it has long been economic gospel that innovation would always find new
ways to employ workers faster than they were rendered obsolete by
automation, it is not clear that this will continue very far into the twenty-first
century. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers pegs the
unemployment rate a decade from now at one in seven, as technology finally
begins to be recognized as a permanent substitute for human labor, even in
white-collar professions like accountancy, legal work, and technical writing.
White-collar automation could ultimately take over some 47% of all white-collar
job categories, Summers has warned.
Since the Industrial Revolution first began, new jobs were always being created
even as old jobs were being done away with or drastically changed. However,
while both the highly skilled (such as lawyers and doctors) and the largely
unskilled (such as farmhands, dockworkers, and manual laborers) tended to
benefit from these newly created jobs, those workers with middle-range skill
sets did not. Like the hand weavers once thrown out of work by steam-powered
looms, mid-level managers and accountants are facing the same sort of risks
today.
Work automation today isnt just about efficiently repeating standardized tasks.
And patterns of implementation of automation vary by industry, country, and
economic sector. For example, in Japan, robotics are likely to be at the center
of new manufacturing, but in India, human labor continues to hold its own, as it
is still relatively inexpensive.
This shuffling among new technologies and potential business responses is
what sets the pace for social change. As The Economist has pointed out, 10
years ago no one believed that self-driven cars would ever be viable, let alone
at the verge of commercialization.
Computers will soon be able to perform detailed image processing on X rays,
text-mine legal materials, and turn out fault-free analyses of tax forms by
breaking these dauntingly complex cognitive tasks into smaller and smaller task
units.
While automation has often been said to help workers rather than replace them,
surely one of the first markets for self-driving cars will be the taxi-cab industry.
In fact, taxis have already been on the receiving end of a disruptive technology:
Ubers ride-sharing app, which allows users to summon others when they need
a ride, thus disrupting the already-in-place taxi-management system. Strikes,
aggressive regulation, and even legislation have all been responses to
competition perceived as unfair throughout Europe and the United States.
Unfair competition is also on the way from machine analysis, which is
becoming sophisticated enough in such areas as text-mining legal documents
that it could soon surpass the abilities of paralegals or other skilled humans.
This proficiency is a matter not just of speed, accuracy, and cost, but also of the
ability to critically assess logical relationships and suggest successful legal
strategiesand then present those assessments in innovative graphic formats
that laypersons can easily grasp.
Some work functions, such as fast-food service, are not likely to be costeffective to automate. Moreover, the ad hoc and interactive nature of a burrito
production line like at Chipotle Mexican Grill (where specific customer
preferences require a customized response and worker agility) could
flabbergast an automated system or else forcibly streamline the process to the
point of alienating consumers.
Another thing to consider is that the push for increasing the minimum wage
could reduce the availability of job opportunities for low-skilled or languagechallenged workers nationwide, as such regulation may push smaller
businesses out of that market.
hiring and project negotiations, the industry also offers a framework for training
and business-practice benchmarking globally.
In 2013, global business travel surpassed 432 million trips, with business being
conducted in hotel rooms, lounges, lobbies, meeting rooms, conference
breakout sessions, and other impromptu/informal settings. This includes
interactive research meetings, where audiences are polled electronically on
issues, values, and preferences. In addition, sessions are increasingly being
simulcast globally and locally, so interactivity and attendance at sessions can
run in parallel.
A growing challenge for business conferences is convincing employers of the
return on investment from live meeting attendance and how it is possible to
partner with both on-site and remote attendees at the same conference to
achieve business goals. And as the ease and reliability of international
connectivity increases, the need to provide value for live attendees coming from
further away at greater expense also increases.
Meeting managers can do this by better understanding business training and
ways to maximize the effectiveness of the learning experience offered by
conferences and meetings. Strategies include:
model) activities.
Enhancing the engagement of all the senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell,
and touch) and maximizing the use of more flexible, open-space organizing
approaches.
Workplace Demographics
One workforce group where changes are proving to be dramatic and lasting is
among those over age 55. In 2012, only Japan reported 30% or more of its
citizens older than 55 years of age, but by 2030, there will be 64 such countries
in that category (the United States alone will have 34%, and Europe will be the
oldest region with 36%).
Health remains the top reason for early retirement, but 39% leave for more
leisure. Most are also looking for new solutions to protect against rising healthcare costs, including the cost of long-term care.
In contrast to previous Sunbelt migrations in the United States, retirement-inplace is growing much more common, even in Snowbelt areas. The end of the
boomer boom in 2030 already suggests that a slowdown of economic growth
may be coming.
Meanwhile, another workforce cohort of concern are the many millennials who
have not gone on to college. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that
employed millennial-age (now 2532 years old) high-school graduates were
earning an average of $18,000 less annually than college graduates in the
same age group. As well, they were four times more likely to be unemployed
(12%) and three times more likely to live below the poverty line (22%).
In contrast, average retirement-age workers now work 4.2 years past their
projected retirement date, and almost 70% consider seeking employment of
some kind after officially retiring. This can include flex-retirement and
volunteering in order to use ones life skills to assist nonprofits.
Certainly a big change is coming in Social Security. The twentieth-century
Social Security model was built on an assumption of 150 workers for each
retiree. By 2030, we should expect that ratio in the United States to be down to
two workers for each retiree. That definitely means significant policy change, as
millennials will represent 30% of the electorate by 2030and 12%
unemployment for those with only a high-school diploma portends civic
discontent. Given the fact that there will be 80 million millennials in the United
States by 2020, they will be a political force to be reckoned with.
The postretirement job market will require successful candidates to focus on
their personal core competencies, especially among those re-careering beyond
age 55. Besides the growth of peer-to-peer services from the elderly to the
elderly, there is also the significant growth potential in collateral markets,
including construction of new service facilities (e.g., community, assisted-living,
and nursing homes). In addition, smart-home tech (health monitoring, security,
connectivity) also brings with it positions in managing, installing, and repairing
the hardware and software to run a smart home, as these collateral industries
grow.