The Future of Work [2]
Ideas from Dash Design Hackathon
See also: Part 1
In November 2017, I took part in a “design hackathon” called Dash, which was hosted at Aalto by a group of young students from the Faculty of Design. It was a great vehicle for eliciting creativity from the community — workshops to get designers, engineers, analysts to work on a problem, sourcing ideas for sponsored topics (e.g. insects as food ingredients) or public good (addressing employment issues for the Ministry of Economic Development). The teams came up with hundreds of ideas, to address important issues (or industry problems), and at the cost of some bread and hummus and other snacks, it was much more economical than hiring design or strategy consultants.
The Larger Backdrop
The larger trends over the coming decades… Automation will go up. Productivity will go up. There will be more wealth than ever. But what about social good and wellbeing of individuals?
If our distribution system is solely based on owning the means of production or having rare marketable skills — which is not even the case now within welfare states — most people won’t have rare hard skills.
The Old Model of Careers
In earlier factories, the workforce was regarded as a mechanical component or a factor in some thermodynamic system. Also people could go work at the same job for 40 years, even earn a good living with that, then enter retirement. Now, structural changes have obliterated opportunities for such jobs and any stability associated with them.
It’s already the case, low-skill jobs no longer provide a comfortable living. They will soon disappear.
A Crisis of Meaning
Even when work becomes unnecessary for generating livelihood, the question of work won’t go away. We still face the other two evils from which work saves us. Without the provided structure of work, however dull, it’s even more effort-consuming to create structure and meaning from leisure.
Strategic Labour Market Planning
What is the role of ministries? In Australia, in the field of vocational education, we’ve heard that the school sat down with the industry, to find out what kind of skills are needed, say, in an engineering office, then adapted the curriculum accordingly. Perhaps this kind of co-development can happen on a larger scale? The ministries can host summits for yearly discussions or establish ongoing industry forums with industry experts, recruitment professionals to lead the effort of predicting the labour market and send out signals for STEM education to evolve more quickly.
Evolving Careers
An obvious view is the whole picture of a career is becoming more dynamic. What can technology help with in this area?
- “Know yourself”, mapping strengths, current skill-sets, roadmaps
- Fluid, evolving career profiles of hard skills, soft skills, transferable layers
- The skill-set is no longer a list, but a dynamic morphing hologram in time
One example is pre-emptive transitions, for example based on forecast and data intelligence, a bank clerk may become redundant in 5 years — then we don’t have to wait for the redundancy to blow up — we can plan ahead with training and personal development based on current profile and skills, and fill in gaps as needed (through training), and in time transition to a different job.
The Bottleneck of Recruitment Pipelines
There’s too much senseless run-around in the current recruitment conventions of application pipelines, with high rates of false positives and false negatives. One idea is to replace the dead end application pipeline with a holographic feedback flow, instead of never hearing anything back on an application, an applicant can discover that X or Y is missing, then find gap-filling development and training based on the information.
Informal Channels
A lot of positions get filled through “informal channels” including referrals — only a fraction go through the open application pipeline. An intelligent solution could suggest to job seekers “go to this event and network” as a way of tapping into these channels.
There could also be peer-to-peer support groups, for studying related subjects, for job seeking in a certain areas — government services can be easily attached to these touch point, e.g. CV workshops, counselling, info aggregation.
The New Landscape of Work
Work life is changing, moving from 9–5 cubicles to workshops, work from home, events, training, summits, conferences, etc. within a dynamic ecosystem. The whole company may go and work from Bali for a month. The whole idea of “working to get paid” may be replaced by actively constructing a working life that is an essential, meaning-giving component of actualising oneself in a social and productive context.
