Building our ecosystem
Our Senior Industry Fellows will become part of an expansive workforce ecosystem to support our mission to invent next-generation skills solutions. FORWARD director Peter Thomas on building intentional knowledge workforce ecosystems.
At FORWARD, The Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation, part of RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, we are not just looking at, and innovating, skills and work, but living the experience ourselves.
Just as we have reimagined space through our Reconciliation and Place project, we are also reimagining how we do our work by creating, and orchestrating, our workforce ecosystem.
This phrase, ‘orchestrating workforce ecosystems’, features prominently in the MIT Sloan Management Review/Deloitte report of the same name that surveyed 4,078 managers in 129 countries across 29 industries. They define a workforce ecosystem as being:
“…focused on value creation for an organization. This structure encompasses actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to pursue both individual and collective goals, and includes interdependencies and complementarities among the participants.”
This of course requires change. As the authors observe:
“We see companies changing basic management practices around how they access, engage, and develop workers; we see leaders adapting to a changing workforce where they have more contributors but less control [this requires] significant shifts in management practices, technology enablers, integration architectures, and leadership approaches.”
While these workforce ecosystems are traditionally thought of as being composed of ‘contingent’ workers — freelancers, contractors and subcontractors — working alongside employees, we are increasingly seeing intentional knowledge workforce ecosystems that are built on more flexible, self-determining and autonomous lines with the aim of creating and capturing value in many different ways.
We, along with our collaborators, partners and stakeholders, believe that in a networked and interconnected world we need to embrace and seek value from many types of contributors.
That’s why we have established a group of Senior Industry Fellows — influential industry professionals who will support our mission to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale and invent next-generation skills solutions.
The role of our Fellows is to provide deep insights from their industries but also to become part of our diverse and expansive ecosystem, creating new value for each other.
The ask to our Fellows is simple: to work with us flexibly and with passion and purpose to act as a sounding board, advisor or collaborator for one of FORWARD’s portfolio of projects, and to bring their insight and a sharp future-focused lens to radically inform what we do.
We would typically expect that our Fellows will have deep and broad connections in their industry, be an influencer in their specialist domain and have a passion for the future of work.
But we also know that the power of an ecosystem is its diversity from which, as in any vibrant ecosystem, can spring outcomes that are impossible to predict from the outset.
As an organisation, we of course celebrate and welcome diversity and inclusion in all of its forms and we are committed to ensuring our people are not limited by traditional stereotypes, roles or prejudices. And alongside this for our Fellows group, we welcome discussions with any individual, whoever they are and regardless of their current industry or role, who feel they have a contribution to make in whatever way they would like to make it.
While the term ‘fellow’ might be a thousand years old, we are seeking to bring fellowship into a modern context in which we work together to create shared value.
Our Fellowships are for 12 months and carry an annual stipend of $5,000.
For an informal discussion, please get in touch with Peter Thomas at peter.thomas@rmit.edu.au
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
