The World of #Jobs
In a future world there may not be a retirement age, we may not all be working 9 -5 work, we may not have job descriptions and we will almost certainly not have culturally sanctioned employment certainty.
In this new landscape of employment we will work project and task, work at any age, work wherever is geographically or digitally best, come and go from employers and clients and work to a more fluid lifestyle, where work life balance and today’s social norms are culturally historical and no longer viable.
This world brings one of possibility and adventure, it mimics a pre industrial age, where we lived on the land we farmed or near the work we had, we worked when work needed to be done, where and when it needed to be done, lived with and close to family and within a community. This is not a rose colored view, times were as tough and as wonderful as they are today.
The constant is that there is and has been no perfect solution to employment and work and most probably will never be. The difference ahead is that we are moving into an era of greater choices and flexibility, where unlike the last 150 years we will not need as often many hands to make light work nor we will not need to gather together at a centralised means of production, but rather for many of us our work will be more decentralised and more fractured in its design, tasks, execution and measurement.
It is this world that James Lush of radio ABC Perth and I spoke about in our regular Saturday morning catch up. James’s questions were thought provoking and made us both reach deeper to find threads of solutions and hints of tomorrow’s thinking.
I’d love you to have a listen to this interview and then share your thoughts on the future world of jobs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What did the 2014 employment signals reveal about the emerging shape of the future workforce?
The 2014 workforce signals were pointing clearly toward a multi-speed employment landscape: high demand and wage growth at the top of the knowledge and skill distribution; significant pressure on routine-task roles across both white-collar and blue-collar categories from automation; and the expansion of platform-mediated work creating a third category — neither traditional employment nor small business — that labour law, social protection systems, and individual financial planning had not been designed for. The challenge was not simply ‘jobs being automated’ but the simultaneous emergence of new work categories that required new frameworks.
Q: How should workforce planners think about automation risk across different role categories?
Effective workforce automation risk assessment evaluates tasks within roles rather than roles as categories — most roles contain both routine elements that are susceptible to automation and non-routine elements that are not. The planning questions are: What proportion of this role’s current task composition is routine and therefore susceptible? What is the realistic timeline for automation capability in this specific task category? What is the transition pathway for current role holders as the task composition shifts? And what investment in capability development now would position current employees for the roles that the changing task composition creates?
Q: What does the Ripple Effects™ framework reveal about the broader consequences of employment transition?
The Ripple Effects™ of employment transition extend beyond the directly affected workers: the communities dependent on those employment categories experience reduced consumer spending and population retention; the educational institutions that have been training for the transitioning roles face demand disruption; the public services — healthcare, housing support, retraining programs — face increased demand precisely when tax bases from affected regions are contracting. Workforce planning that accounts for these Ripple Effects leads to earlier, more comprehensive intervention than planning focused only on the directly displaced.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for a future of work, workforce strategy, or employment transitions keynote?
Contact the booking team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
In a future world there may not be a retirement age, we may not all be working 9 -5 work, we may not have job descriptions and we will almost certainly not have culturally sanctioned employment certainty. In this new landscape of employment we will work project and task, work at .
The shift around The World of #Jobs is not purely structural. It changes what capabilities organisations value, how people find meaning in their roles, and what conditions make good work possible. Leaders who understand this early retain the talent they need and build cultures that attract it.
The most important question is not whether The World of #Jobs will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
