Abundance in the Future of Work
You don’t need to look far in the tech industry to hear the phrase “future of work.” It’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue, at the forefront of trade shows and quietly stewing in the back of everyone’s mind. Following Moore’s law, technology is evolving at an exponential rate. Everything does more and cost less, AI is smarter, and automation threatens to displace 800 million jobs by 2030. While these statistics can give us anxiety a deeper examination reveals that the demand for workers may be higher than ever.
According to Manpower Groups 2016/17 annual talent shortage survey, more than forty percent of employers report difficulty filling jobs, and they aren’t looking for people to flip their burgers. They need everything from skilled trades, to business executives, finance experts to administrative assistants. What’s more is that this forty percent is only the global average with the United States averaging 46%, Singapore 51%, Hong Kong 69% and Japan at a whopping 86% shortage. These numbers are expected to increase.
How is it possible that there can be so much potential displacement despite a growing demand for workers? This glaring contrast demonstrates some of the major flaws that present models of talent acquisition and highlights the need for an autonomous ecosystem that transcends the traditional boundaries of work. It shows us that the problem may not lie necessarily in a lack of opportunity, but a lack of means to connect people to these opportunities as they arise.
According to The Economist
“in the past technology has always ended up creating more jobs than it destroys. That is because of the way automation works in practice… Automating a particular task, so that it can be done more quickly or cheaply, increases the demand for human workers to do the other tasks around it that have not been automated.”
The articles continues on to give examples:
“Automated teller machines (ATMs) might have been expected to spell doom for bank tellers by taking over some of their routine tasks, and indeed in America their average number fell from 20 per branch in 1988 to 13 in 2004… But that reduced the cost of running a bank branch, allowing banks to open more branches in response to customer demand. The number of urban bank branches rose by 43% over the same period, so the total number of employees increased. Rather than destroying jobs, ATMs changed bank employees’ work mix, away from routine tasks and towards things like sales and customer service that machines could not do.”
This situation is repeatable throughout history showing that automation may not in fact spell the end for the working class.
Talent Placement in the Future of Work.
So the future may hold more abundance than scarcity: but with an increase in opportunity comes exponential demand for talented people. In many circumstances, there are barriers that create talent shortages are byproducts of variables such as geographic location, expanding gig-economy, job-hopping cohorts, but most often these are due to lack of awareness. Additionally, the whole process is still very manual. Upload your resume, search for the opportunity, apply for the job, rinse, repeat
Even professional recruiters can only effectively scan so many profiles, so professional networks are limited and talent difficult to find. Examining this, it becomes obvious that solutions are needed to address existing barriers. More effective talent placement is quickly becoming a necessity for businesses to grow and progress.
Fortunately, AI and automation give us options and the awareness to access emerging global opportunities. Working remotely is getting better, and countries with abundant tech-workers can be tapped into by companies with next-gen recruitment tools. Blockchain technology will massively increase transparency and verifying who we are and the talents we bring will be as easy as linking an Ethereum address to one’s professional profile. Blockchain technology could easily close the door to employment prejudice and create more balanced workplaces.
For enterprises, these enhancements will lead to greater talent retention through deeper employee insights and better cultural fits. Reduced HR costs will help companies scale effectively, and staffing improvements may actually improve hire rate for students and recent graduates who bring cutting-edge skills to the marketplace.
Speaking of education, it is likely that in the future of work technology will enable us to better empower our career paths, using our goals to outline gaps in our knowledge and recommending solutions to fill them. This will allow us to become qualified candidates faster, and organically transition to roles that are more in line with our values and desires.
So could it be the gritty, edgy sci-fi worlds of tomorrow we were promised may not ever come to fruition, provided these solutions can come into reality, utopia may not actually be that far off. However, while future of work may be bright, back here in the present, these solutions are still very much needed, and that’s why we’re building them.
If you’d like to connect with any of the BlockABL team we’d love to have you join us in our telegram channel: https://t.me/ABL_Ecosystem
