As technology changes the way people work and businesses attract and keep talent, both will have to reinvent themselves to remain viable, an expert on human-centred performance told a breakfast meeting of about 75 community and business leaders at the Tannery Event Centre Tuesday.
For some, that means learning the equivalent of a master’s degree every 10 years to keep pace with changing knowledge demands, said David Mallon, chief analyst at Bersin, a U.S.-based division of Deloitte that researches human resources issues centred around the future of learning and work.
“We don’t earn a living, we learn a living,” Mallon said, adding to a phrase originally used by Marshall McLuhan in 1964.
Mallon’s talk was the first in a local series that will dissect the future of work and learning. Communitech partnered with Deloitte, Manulife and the University of Waterloo in the hopes of taking a community approach that will turn Waterloo Region into a test bed of ideas to best tackle the changing workforce and business needs, said Simon Chan, head of corporate innovation thought leadership at Communitech.
“It was about tackling a community problem and trying to get ahead of it like entrepreneurs do,” said Chan.
Mallon’s talk outlined seven variables that will change the way people work: technology; a tsunami of data; AI and computing robotics; jobs that are vulnerable to automation; diversity and generational changes; the fact that we’re living longer, so our careers will be longer as well; and an explosion in contingent work.
All seven mean businesses will need to reimagine the dimensions of work, said Mallon. Instead of hiring a certain number of employees, businesses will need to think about what type of work needs to be done in the future and the kind of talent that will fill the gap.
That might mean businesses won’t have a traditional workforce of full-time staff but a combination of freelancers and gig work with automation and full-time staff woven in.
That also means some organizations may have to change their structure to succeed.
The best organizations, Mallon said, spend time rewarding employees for taking good risks, create spaces for employees to step outside their comfort zone and practise new skills, and also figure out how to use data to improve learning to quickly understand what’s working and what’s not.
But above all, they also listen.
“The best organizations listen all the time, not just periodically,” said Mallon, who was hampered by the weather and couldn’t make the trip to Kitchener, and appeared via Skype from his home in Seattle.
Christine Robinson, head of human resources at Manulife Canada, said Mallon’s talk shed light on the challenges ahead, but also left her optimistic.
“Traditional models of work were about filling full-time jobs with established skill sets whereas today and into the future we’re going to have to be more interested in adding to our toolkit,” she said.
The idea of learning the equivalent of a master’s degree to keep pace with the changes “can be scary but also an invigorating way to approach one’s career,” added Robinson.
Mallon’s talk is the first in a series on the future of work and learning that will culminate at Communitech’s True North conference on June 19-20. The next breakfast session is a panel discussion on Feb. 26.
The talks are the brainchild of Communitech’s Chan, who began to hear questions from companies about how to attract talent.
That got Chan thinking about how work is morphing and how changes to technology are also shifting how people work. Millennials, for example, want non-traditional work, he noted.
For Chan, that raised a key question: How can we build an innovative culture and be a leader in changes around future work?
Mallon’s talk was a way to start the conversation in Waterloo Region, but it’s a sentiment Communitech CEO Iain Klugman echoed Tuesday morning.
“Talent is changing. How we relate as a workforce is changing,” said Klugman. “There are huge skills gaps out there. At the same time that we have people out there that can’t find work, we have these huge talent shortages.”
Chan said he hopes by testing the waters on what may work in the future, the region can act as a lighthouse to other communities facing similar challenges.
