The 4th Industrial Revolution trends are disrupting long-established business models: growing demand for customized products; shifts and skill mismatches in production value chains; digitization across every dimension of manufacturing; and a volatile socioeconomic climate marked by protectionism and populism.
The most relevant question to businesses, governments, and individuals is not to what extent automation will affect current employment numbers, but how and under what conditions the global labor market can be supported in reaching a new equilibrium in the division of labor between human workers, robots and algorithms.
More and more, employers are seeking workers with new skills from further afield to retain a competitive edge for their enterprises and expand their workforce productivity. Some workers are experiencing rapidly expanding opportunities in a variety of new and emerging job roles, while others are experiencing a rapidly declining outlook in a range of job roles traditionally considered “safe bets” and gateways to a lifetime career.
The right to work, to free choice of employment, is a basic human right. The modern labor market is fragmented, ultra-specialized, filled with all sorts of alternative work arrangements or gig-employment. It becomes an extremely confusing and Darwinist environment for individuals, as the growing sense of job insecurity cuts to the core of identity and social stability.
The emerging contours of the new world of work are rapidly becoming a lived reality for millions of workers around the world. The inherent opportunities for economic prosperity, societal progress and individual flourishing in this new world of work are enormous yet depend crucially on the ability of all concerned stakeholders to instigate reforms in education and training systems, labor market policies, business approaches to developing skills, employment arrangements and existing social contracts.
For this to happen, every person must have access to personalized career and development opportunities at the time it matters, and the free flow and wealth of the individual’s career data is key to personalized guidance and better opportunities.
Currently, individuals share their resume with an employer when applying for a job. In the best case, they update their LinkedIn profile with major career events, so we get a snapshot every now and then of their career profile.
If we would have a continuously updated and changing picture of the individual’s career records, we would get the equivalent of a movie rather than the scarce pictures we have now. Then we could begin to harness the latest technology to see the context of where things are heading and the changes over time. To mitigate the impact of the 4th industrial revolution data must be used in much more meaningful ways than today, guiding people as they develop and manage their careers.