reprinted from seek.com Author: Emma Whalan

Morris Miselowski is an Australian business futurist engaged to identify what the future of employment looks like. He predicts that our working future will see boring tasks increasingly automated, leaving workers to take on more stimulating jobs that require more thought and attention. An exciting prospect, but one that demands an upskilled work force to deliver on this prediction. For Hirer’s this means innovation and invention around recruitment, resourcing and retaining staff.

Spending his working life immersed in the future, Miselowski has shared six of his future job facts with SEEK to give a glimpse of what lies ahead.

Rise of the freelancer

Miselowski believes that more of us could be freelancing or contracting for multiple employers in the future, moving away from honing a particular skill set. He also predicts that our working life will consist of six careers and 14 job changes.

What does this mean for Hirers: This desire for change will put additional pressure on retention strategies. It is imperative that future focused strategies be designed are flexible enough to reflect and acknowledge transferrable skills and look to place strong talent in different divisions or disciplines to answer their quest for the new, but allow you to retain the individual.

Disruptive innovation

Disruptive innovation will continue to change the way existing industries operate, like Uber, Airbnb and Amazon have. Technology will make work more transactional and employees will need to embrace change and become more entrepreneurial. Those that do, may find themselves freed from the traditional working structure as jobs will move away from the Monday to Friday, 9 – 5 model. Miselowski also believes service roles will increase as our growing need for instant gratification means we’ll be employing people to do one-off tasks for us.

What does this mean for Hirers: Acquisition strategies should focus on hiring staff that embrace change, question and are self-starters. These three attributes will shine in a distributive innovation environment.

Soft skills

Soft skills, or interpersonal skills, will gain in importance. Skills like empathy will allow us to be flexible and we need to focus on increasing our management, HR and organisational behaviour skills and paying more attention to how you interact with those around you.

What does this mean for Hirers: A focus on training in leadership not just management skills will strengthen the soft skills component of your leadership team and set you in good stead.

Flexible attitude to training

Employees will need continual and self-driven training to ensure they keep abreast of changes in their industry.

What does this mean for Hirers: From an HR point of view, encouraging a professional development plan for employees, that is self-driven, will help balance the need and desire for formal training with the clever use of assets and opportunities that are readily available to the individual.

Technology dependent

Unsurprisingly, jobs will become more technology dependent. All of us need to embrace computer literacy to ensure we stay on top of these changes.

What does this mean for Hirers: Continual training and top up courses to ensure that staff are utilising the technology available to them effectively, will ensure the most efficient use of technology within the workplace.

More interesting and specialised work

As technology advances and our computers relieve of us of the repetitive tasks associated with our jobs, we will be freed to do more interesting and specialised work. This can only be a positive as we know satisfaction and loyalty increases with deeper job engagement.

What does this mean for Hirers: This may be met with some hesitation, no one wants to feel replaceable, but with the right positioning this can and will be seen as one of the major benefits of the evolution of work.

Incredibly, these trends are predicted to be in play by 2020 which seems such a short time for so much change. The future is bright and close.

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