How to better think about the future of work
Being a twenty-something in a world living through a pandemic and the climate crisis, I wonder: what will the future of work look like?
As the Danish proverb warns, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” So don’t expect specific predictions from this article but rather guidelines on:
- how to think about the future of our work
- how to face and what projects are working to find that out.
These come mostly from interviewing people with extensive expertise in this area: Marcela Acosta, Project Manager at Universities of the Future, Kati Tawast, Senior Lecturer and Project Manager at CLEMET project and Inês Santos Silva, Managing Partner of Aliados Consulting and previous Advisor to the Secretary of State of Industry of Portugal. Read more about these projects in the last chapter.
Perspectives on the future of work
Here are the main topics about the future of work that were raised in the conversations with Marcela, Kati and Inês.
Be open to more complexity & collaboration
As a tendency that is seen for some decades, work will be more complex. Inês gave a good example with cars — 30 years ago it was common for people to repair their car, but nowadays it is not so easy as cars have integrated complicated systems that require different types of knowledge. The same is seen in work as problems get more intricated and technically challenging, they require the involvement of different fields of knowledge and stakeholders, making work more multidisciplinary and collaborative.
With increasing complexity and automation, the future of work might not be as looming as most imagine. As Marcela exemplified, in a collaborative future instead of losing his/her job, a linguist might be working with a software engineer to develop a program that is training a language algorithm. This is one way our professions may adapt.
Accept not knowing & change
As we think about the future of work, we might want to accept that new jobs that we can’t imagine today will emerge in the future.
“I see a future where new jobs that right now we don’t even imagine are existing.”
This is a quote from Inês’ interview where she mentioned examples of new jobs that now exist which we didn’t imagine before, such as video games coaches who mentor people to play better or people whose job is to facilitate online meetings (whose rise we saw with COVID-19 pandemic). So one might want to start accepting that we could be working in jobs that we don’t imagine that will exist.
This also means that work will change faster. As I reflect on my professional life so far, I realise that constant change has been part of my experience since I started working. Being it positions that end or management that changes the purpose of the work, I realise that I am always on the lookout for the next change. Maybe that is something my generation shares. If you happen to be a student reading this article, I understand if you fear this, but once you live it, you get used to it.
Read the room
“The growth and absolute scale of a number of those professions will be distinctively determined by the choices and investment made by governments today. New investments in the Green Economy, such as a focus on renewable energy, have the potential to lead to expanding employment prospects in this sector.”
Our work is affected by what goes on in the world. The quote above, from the World Economic Forum “Jobs of Tomorrow” report, enhances how it is important to understand the way our jobs relate to legislation and global trends.
For instance, the EU aims to be climate neutral in 2050. Finland pledged to become carbon neutral by 2035. What is your country aiming for? As Kati mentioned, we have to pay attention to what direction our country is going. Sustainability is a clear global trend, but there are many more factors to consider, such as the economic model of our country (service- or industry-based).
How should we look at work?
Train yourself like a sportsperson
Marcela emphasized the importance of lifelong learning and the fact that if we want to keep working, we will have to try different things and develop ourselves.
Inês gave the example of sportspeople. If you consider professional basketball players, they are expected to improve throughout their career. They not only have the team coach, but also different personal coaches to help them improve.
But for some reason, we don’t look at any other profession the same way. It is common to study while we are in school and then rely on our 9–5 work to develop ourselves. Maybe we should look at work the same way sportspeople do. Inês actually thinks we will, as having coaches for different aspects of our life is an increasing trend (life coaches, career coaches, etc.). We might want to start thinking: who can take me to the next level?
Shape your life attitude
Kati mentions how being curious and open to new things increases our adaptability to a changing work environment. So aim for doing varied meaningful things in your every day — make sure your life is interesting as it may pay off in your work later on. One way to step out of your comfort zone is to bubble travel. This method was introduced to me by the co-founder of Green Elephant, Estève Pannetier. Consider the bubbles of your life — your childhood friends, your dance class, your work environment — and think: where can I go to step outside of my bubbles? It can be the local cosplay community, volunteering at the dog shelter or joining a hiking club.
Develop the capacity for introspection
An important skill to develop in order to evolve our career path is the understanding of our strengths and weaknesses, of how we learn, work with others and of what work environment we best strive. We get this understanding not only by gathering several life experiences but also by being able to reflect on them. Inês suggested the book Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker, as a good tool to start developing the capacity for introspection.
Marcela also highlighted observing where we stand as a professional in the marketplace: How is my skillset for the positions I aim for? How much is there a need for it in the marketplace? Am I getting too much into my own thing? Are there other things that perhaps I am missing?”
With this capacity for introspection, we might also learn about what we want to do in our professional future. Kati suggests looking at what gives us enjoyment in our everyday life and thinking: What can be related to this in terms of work? What could be the other context where you can apply these skills? If you like to bring people together and feel most energized when socialising, you may lean towards being a community manager or a diplomat.
What projects are working on the future of work?
Here are the projects that the interviewees of this blogpost — Marcela, Kati and Inês — are working on in regards to the future of work.
Universities of the Future (UoF)
With exponential technological developments, companies are dramatically changing their working processes, which require employees’ recurring upskilling. Universities of the Future is a programme that explores the ways higher education institutions, businesses and public authorities can cooperate to prepare current and future workforce for their changing workplace, through lifelong learning. UoF started in 2017 and it involves a network of participating organisations from Portugal, Poland and Finland.
Marcela emphasised one of the outcomes of the programme: the International Joint Post-graduation in Industry 4.0, which started in September 2020. It includes courses such as soft and t-skill, change management in shifting to I4.0 and sustainable enablers. In addition, it incorporates a project module where university students and people from the industry from Portugal, Poland and Finland will be mixed in teams to work on a company challenge.
Cleantech Mobility Education for Tomorrow (CLEMET)
CLEMET Project, which started in March 2020, focuses on what kinds of competence needs cleantech will create for the automotive engineering sector and how these needs could be met through continuing education or various learning environments. To answer this brief, the project gathers Finnish universities, City of Espoo, the Joint Authority of Education in the Espoo Region and the research institution VTT. The project ultimate goal is to build a new kind of learning environment, remote and in-person, that applies living lab methods.
To develop this, Kati emphasised the importance of a systems thinking approach, in which they involve different stakeholders like citizens, companies, public sector cities, universities in order to build fast-reacting, learning ecosystems, to create new service and business models and to finally have open and free resource sharing between different stakeholders.
Aliados Consulting
Although not working on a project to figure out the future of work, Aliados Consulting is experimenting with the ways of working that will be most beneficial for their business in a changing and tech-driven future.
Aliados Consulting is an innovation consulting firm focused on social impact, in which Inês is a co-founder and Executive Director. As we concluded in the first chapter, work will be more collaborative, so their team has been experimenting with different collaboration models. On their journey to empower organisations to move towards a sustainable future, they aim to work as a platform, but the challenge lays in finding the right model that is both flexible and efficient. So far, they have learned that they need a central structure — such as admin, sales and customer support — that ensures the basic functions of the company and for project execution, they hire senior consultants with the right expertise for each client brief.
Thank you for reading!
What are your views on the future of work? Please share your opinions in the comments section.
