Future of Work - Some Trends

Growing up, the workplace was not expected to undergo any dramatic changes so much so that we chugged along in school and college learning skills based on past experiences. These skills were expected to continue to serve us well in the future. That was then, though. With the deluge of technological advances / capabilities pouring in from all directions and in all regions, we, the society, are impacted in both unprecedented and unpredictable manner. I, thus, expect the future of work to be anything but stable. As a father and as a citizen of the world, I am keen to explore the technologies impacting and skills needed to prosper and attain job satisfied at work in the future.

I expect the following four trends to emerge and impact the future of work:

1. Advances in AI will continue unabated and, in short term AI will result in skills gap and not reduction of jobs.

Some highly knowledgeable people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Professor Stephen Hawking have warned about the possibility that AI could evolve to the point that it would get beyond human control. Prof Hawking said he felt that machines with AI could "spell the end of the human race". AI is “our biggest existential threat” to mankind, claims tech leader Elon Musk. In-spite of these words of warning by some highly influential and knowledgeable folks, I think the genie is out of the bottle and AI will continue to develop and evolve. Significant investments and modern innovation phenomenon - that has created level playing field offering opportunities to firms of all sizes, across all regions and sectors to come up with game-changing innovations - will continue to fuel AI advancements regardless. The problem is that we are not yet able to predict, and hence control or regulate a world where AI systems can out-learn, out-think and out-reason humans. We will see louder voices for some sort of digital ethics or regulatory treaty to limit what AI systems should be allowed to do. Predictably AI will be a wild ride because, if it can be built, it will be built. If you donot do it, someone else will. Still the warnings about AI’s potential to overwhelm humans are worthy and need to be looked at urgently. In long term, and if left unchecked, AI could be more devastating than nuclear weapons - Stephen Hawking is correct in fore-warning us about it. 

In the short-term though, AI and Robotics would, and are already, bringing tremendous benefits to society like correctly predicting the location of the next crime or strategies of the terrorists. They will continue to automate routine jobs and in doing so they will eliminate some jobs while creating many more. It is likely that AI will result in rise of “useless workers” – these workers will not only be unemployed but they will also be unemployable unless they re-skill. Many jobs will be affected and the nature of work will, indeed, change profoundly. While it is easy to see the jobs that will be impacted, it is more difficult to predict the type of new jobs that will be created. These new jobs will require new skills and thus potentially creating a massive skills gap. This change is already visible around us. Below are the new jobs created in last 10 years:

2. Cities will build clusters and war for talent will get localised and intense

We have seen that in our knowledge-intensive, millennials driven world companies and people (employees, investors, VC’s etc) cluster in order to share information, generate ideas, cut deals, access talent and generally benefit from being part of the ecosystem. Ecosystem tends to operate more efficiently when all are available in person and meet face to face. 

In the future, governments will take lead in creating multiple clusters (cities) that are distributed enough to avoid pressure on a single location. E.g. In England, we have Reading being spruced up as a tech cluster outside London. These clusters have quick and easy commute to other clusters; strong technology backbone and local economy to bank on. The consensus view among futurists and city planners has been that workers and companies would simply locate to a cluster and connect electronically. Critically, a) war for talent will bypass companies to move to cities who will actively engage with workers to attract them to their cluster and b) need for permanent office will reduce.

The top 5 UK Tech clusters are as follows:

 3. Freelancing will grow rapidly to surpass permanent employees in 10 years

As we discussed above, the future of work will evolve rapidly impacting all aspects and participants. With higher life-spans, in a typical working life we could witness multiple (possibly 20) jobs across multiple (maybe 8–10) different careers. This will usher is an era of continuous re-learning (covered in next section) and era of multiple income streams. The nature of work will also change with automation (AI), humans will do less of the routine and focus more on project work. Companies will tend to contract hire project leaders with appropriate skills for their respective projects and programmes of work. This work cocktail will give impetus for freelancing to flourish.

Millennials have already displayed a tendency for a) freelancing and b) shorter stints in permanent roles. We predict that this trend will continue to grow globally with more workers freelancing. As less full-time roles become the new normal, I expect more people to have a portfolio of income streams from freelancing jobs where they provide services to different customers. On a day, I might rent out my driver-less car; drive for Uber, let out my bedroom through AirBnB and rent the unused time on my computer to companies doing massively distributed processing. On another day, I might conduct online class to teach social skills; work on my vertical garden, manage an AI project, and use my garage as “last mile storage” for distribution companies.

Growth in freelancing will be further supported by how organizations will respond to the constantly changing business and labour environment. Many organizations have already adopted a very flexible organisation design that allows then to pull together teams quickly that are a mix of employees, external partners, contractors, specialist software tools, suppliers and customers. Some other organizations with digital mindset – that adopt exponential rather than linear thinking - will augment these “squads” with freelancing mavericks or innovation experts to encourage experimentation.  

4. Education system will revamp to address skills gaps

Our education system is broken in many ways. Firstly, students graduate with large loans to repay and organisations benefit from hiring these students without monetarily contributing much to the education system. The system needs to turn itself on its head where organizations, being the richest and the constituent that benefits the most from the education system, pay for it and students, the poorest constituent, participate in it for free. Secondly, we cannot continue to prepare future students by teaching them disciplines – maths, sciences, art, languages etc - in silos. Most, if not all, real-life challenges happen at the intersection of these disciplines.  We must, thus, break down the silos within education system to prepare these students for the future. Thirdly, students must “learn how to learn” using rapid learning approaches and simulation based training to prepare for the need of continuous learning of new skills in the future. Needless to say that education providers need to be aware of the potential future requirements of the labour market to make sure that they equip students with skills they’d require to be competitive in the future.

We already notice that project-based schools, many offered by technology experts, are cropping up. Examples include Holberton in San Francisco, founded by Sylvain Kalache and Julien Barbier; Wildflower School in Boston, founded by former Google exec Sep Kamvar. I expect such schools to set the stage for what future education will look like. We will rethink the way talent is developed and deployed, and prepare students for a lifetime of learning better paced to the rapid evolution of skills.