that has been unfairly pinned on them. Research by Gallup indicates that 55 percent of millennials are simply not engaged at work. Many don’t want to job-hop, but their companies fail to give them compelling reasons to stay. This is a product of the traditional talent operating model that boxes people in with a culture that roadblocks learning, growth and taking on new challenges. In today’s tight talent markets, every organization needs to constantly provide employees with significant motivation to stay.2
Maynard Webb and Carlye Adler, the authors of Rebooting Work, provide a framework that illustrates how work is changing and what organizations have to do to engage their employees. They write about the millennials’ high levels of disengagement and their need to embrace their entrepreneurial spirit and take control of their careers by seeking fulfilling work. Webb and Adler contrast four philosophies of work (see Figure 2.1). They believe that whether you start your own company or work for another person, you can be the “CEO of Your Own Destiny” and embark on a path to a gratifying career.3
Webb and Adler further argue that the rise in freelance work might have been prompted by the economic downturn and people looking for employment, but it has nevertheless inspired a generation to take more control over their careers, reduce commuting time and leverage technology to work anywhere at any time. This concept fits well with their desire to integrate work and life and to be more in command of their work options.
Technology and Obsolescence
Early signs of the unprecedented velocity, scope and impact of what has been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution are becoming apparent. Previous industrial revolutions made substantial improvements in the way we farmed; brought us into the Industrial Age, ushered in mass production; and eventually propelled us into the Information Age, whose eruption of technology and available information makes it easier to access facts and find talent through the Internet with job boards like Monster and social networks like LinkedIn.
Figure 2.1 Four Philosophies of Work
Maynard Webb and Carlye Adler, Rebooting Work: Transform How You Work in the Age of Entrepreneurship (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013).
Klaus Schwab from the World Economic Forum defines the Fourth Industrial Revolution as one characterized by a range of new technologies fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.4 According to the World Economic Forum, four specific technological advances are significantly disrupting the world of work: high-speed mobile Internet, widespread adoption of big-data analytics, artificial intelligence and cloud technology.5 These new technologies are economic game changers, and the rate of change for new technologies remains unabated. So does disruption in all sectors, from retail to health care. With respect to people, the capital investments an organization is making in new technologies have short- and long-term implications. People need to be trained, and often in a hurry. But can a talent operating model—perhaps even yours—that is designed for a different time keep up?
Here is a prime example of technological advances creating disruptions. In 2001, people who lived in Oakland, California, and worked in San Francisco had to drive an hour in traffic, pay a $3 toll to cross a bridge, and spend $40 a day to park their cars. Many of these people lived too far away from public transit to make it convenient to get to work. But then an interesting change occurred. “Casual carpool,” a new social phenomenon that hundreds of thousands of commuters used to travel to work, sprung up all over the East Bay. Every morning, people lined up at predetermined spots (generally bus stops) and waited for drivers to come by to pick them up to form carpools. The drivers then proceeded over the Bay Bridge and dropped their passengers off in downtown San Francisco. As an added bonus, carpools were allowed to cross the bridge for free and had access to expedited lanes. Never did these carpoolers imagine that less than a decade later, mobile technology and big data would be leveraged to create Uber, a ride-share service similar to casual carpooling, but now, of course, not free. This is just one-way technology has disrupted our world—in this case causing a massive panic in the taxi industry by launching a system where people are more in control of their transportation experiences.
The Half-Life of Skills
In 2011, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown stated that the half-life of the skills we learn is only five years. New technologies or transformations in business practices will make half of what we know obsolete in a five-year span.6 With the amount of change we’ve experienced in the past decade, the half-life of skills is even shorter today. According to the World Economic Forum, by 2022, the core skills required to do a job will shift by 42 percent, resulting in the loss of an estimated 75 million jobs.7 However, media drama about robots taking over jobs is a slight exaggeration. Although many jobs will be lost to automation, several sources also estimate a net gain of new jobs due to digital transformation.8 The World Economic Forum predicts this increase will amount to 133 million new jobs, a net gain of 58 million.9
By 2020, 14 percent of the global workforce may need to switch occupations due to digitization, artificial intelligence and automation.10 As a result of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an unparalleled shift in the skills required by the workforce is occurring. The hot jobs today—full-stack developers, user experience designers, cloud developers, data analysts and AI engineers—didn’t even exist a decade ago, so who knows what the next hot skill set will be.
In their book, A New Culture of Learning, authors Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown tell us that “the half-life of a learned skill is 5-years,” meaning that half of what we know will become obsolete in that time because of new technology or transformations in business practices.
This new world of work has enormous potential to fulfill the desire of millennials to find more purpose and meaning in work. As the more mundane aspects of their jobs are removed, they are able to contribute to the success of their companies in completely different ways. Aaron Hurst’s book The Purpose Economy shares how millennials want to build opportunities for self-expression into their day-to-day roles. But that, of course, requires new skills.11
Fifty-three percent of U.S. CEOs think their companies should retrain workers when jobs are eliminated through automation.12 Unfortunately, only the highest-skilled workers receive reskilling, if it happens at all.13 With the rapid pace at which skills are changing, companies must develop new strategies to upskill and reskill within the flow of work. It is not practical to expect employees to devote time to leave the workforce or take time away from their jobs to keep up with the skills necessary to compete today. However, if organizations don’t find new approaches to revamp their talent operating model, the world of work will move from one that can provide employees with meaningful work to one that increases the gap between the haves and have-nots.
But not all the responsibility should reside with organizations. Employees must proactively pursue continuous learning opportunities to ensure their skills don’t become obsolete. Governments must provide incentives and facilitate the creation of public-private partnerships to encourage companies to invest in reskilling their employees.
As we advance further into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it is imperative for companies to rethink the way they work. The speed of change continues to accelerate. The need to adapt and pivot is becoming critical for everyone.
The Rise and Makeup of Adaptive Teams
According
