The Future of Work: Impacts and Key Advice For Your Career

Great, more futurism stuff. Thanks, dude 👌.

First of all, let’s make it clear, I’m at your side. I have also been sick of reading stuff that just triggers me more euphoria and terror. So, this content has primarily been created to help people like us.

Over the past several years, drastic changes caused by technological and social disruptions have thrown our traditional assumptions and norms into near existential crisis. The focus of this content is to give you clarity of the impacts in your career and suggest key practical advice.

It’s important to note that we are living in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Even the experts don’t have all the answers about how work will look like in the future.

However, because the topic had finally achieved a status of high priority in the mainstream, at least we have the best minds and leaders starting to work together to formulate the right questions and find alternatives.

The conclusions I summarised below were based on the following sources: Institute For The Future, Kevin Kelly, Singularity University, Jason Silva (Awe Academy), Andrew McAfee (MIT), Vivek Wadhwa, Tim Ferriss, Simon Sinek, Charlie Kim (Next Jump), Marc Coleman (Unleash), Seth Godin, Kristin Sharp (SHIFT), Stanford (BEAM), Oliver Libby (Resolution Project), Marci Alboher, Walter Isaacson, John Smart (Foresight University), SXSW, Larry Lessig, Anthony Goldbloom, Barry Schwartz, Rainer Strack, Futurism.com, Wired, Techcrunch, VICE, Harvard Business Review, FastCo, Huffington Post.

Highly probable impacts in your career

• Exponential technologies outpace the rate we can civilise new inventions and uncertainty increases.
• Traditional brands and organisations are disintermediated.
• Replacement of traditional jobs by automation. Impacted jobs will be of four types: those that are better done by robots than by humans, not doable by humans, jobs not imagined yet, and jobs humans want to give up.
• Massive change in the global workforces: labor shortage, skills mismatch and cultural change.
• More concentration and power to the “1%”. A less tech prepared, and very representative, portion of the middle class is under pressure (e.g. blue collar).
• Middle-managers are automated.
• From now to 2020 the world will be kind of the same, but from 2020 to 2030 it will be completely different.
• Lifetime of a career now is 5 years.
• New occupations will be born and they will prosper unequally, causing envy and inequality.
• New policies and initiatives to avoid left people behind are created and a new experimentation phase begins.
• Everything is always becoming — we will be newbies forever, no matter your age or experience. This, of course, will be hard, uncomfortable and painful.
• Frustration and despair tend to increase as the new storyline that explains to people how to build a career is still not identified.
• Megacities continue to proliferate as opportunity centres, and community exodus and global migration grow.
• On-demand housing, work, and transportation create life-as-a-service.
• Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.
• Pocket markets appear/disappear quickly and overwhelm consumers with noisy offerings.
• Brands will become valuable through their trust, authenticity will be certified by digital watermarks, fans will pay to attend live performances. What people value in this era of copy, share and flow is immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and discoverability.
• Skills streaming rapidly diffuse leading-edge behaviours.
• Novel skills increase in relevance.
• We are “screening” rather than just reading. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking and we live in a golden age of new mediums. We are in a period of productive remixing.
• The explosion of content and flows open up new kinds of opportunities for filtering: gatekeepers, curators, brands, friends, cultural environment and even government. There are many emerging forms of untapped attention, and a “blank continent” is opening up. Filters will ultimately define who we are in terms of preferences.
• The digital world is both enlightening and distracting at the same time, and a new movement that balances and disciplines usage is born.
• Peer-to-peer alternatives disrupt traditional power institutions.
• New types of distributed institutions based on blockchain are invented.
• New massive-scale operating system for managing civilisations becomes available.
• Capitalism’s values in crisis. Sustainability, moral and ethics increase in importance and are re-evaluated. Humanism evolves into something new.
• Virtual assistants, immersive tools and bots become part of our daily routines.
• Ubiquitous tracking sensors are leading to the quantified self, personal analytics, and life-streaming.
• Big data brings Psychohistory from fiction to reality — the science of predicting the behaviour of large groups of people.
• Biohacking (programmable biology) become available to regular people.
• New forms of co-creation, sharing, and learning are created.
• Virtual work arises.
• The face of the workplace changes significantly as the motivation for more autonomy, work-life balance, independence, choice, and meaning increase.
• Work and life bond together.
• Real-life, face-to-face, community centres flourish.
• Work that combine passion, community, and a force for positive change increase in popularity.
• Privacy challenges — the trade-off between opt-in tracking, transparency, surveillance, coveillance, and benefits is questioned.

Key advice from top experts

This is an unprecedented moment in the world’s history. We live in a time of transitions between technological advancements and social revolutions. Take advantage of the rising opportunities:

• The next decade will transform the way we work, learn, and play.
• New assets, social contracts, lifestyles and capabilities.
• New policies experimentation across all institutions of our society.

We are moving away from people trying to find an established job that has clearly defined responsibilities, into something where you have to figure out what you want to do, how to connect to the training for it, figure out how to brand yourself and prove to other people you’re good at it and that it’s necessary:

• Create a new storyline.
• Learn how to reposition yourself.
• Manage a portfolio of reputation, trans-disciplinary skills, relationships, and physical assets.
• The rise of encore careers: mid and later-life people who want to use their life experience to benefit society through a second or third career.

In some areas, not in all areas, it’s possible for one person, or a few people, to achieve the kind of scale that previously you needed a whole organisation to achieve, or none organisation could have done before:

• Social structured new ways of creating value.
• New kinds of coordination, reputation and trust mechanisms.
• Shaping the cloud of creativity that boils up from the crowd needs some type of intermediaries.

New emerging workers archetypes offer powerful alternatives:

• Microworker (gig economy): work is a string of tasks that shape the rhythm of work in any given day. These workers move in and off multiple microwork platforms.
• Amplified Entrepreneur: work is an adventure for these self-starters, who reject career ladders and organise work as a series of passion-driven projects.
• Dream Builder: balancing jobs and career (don’t matter where) that pay the rent with passion projects and big dreams that make the future (they separate meaning and money).
• Culture Hacker: hacking culture to break down divisions between work and life, colleagues and friends, profession and family. They want to hack the whole organisational structure. They want to remake what work is about, what life is about, learning, leasure.

Adapt your mindset to the new reality:

• Problem Solving
• Computational thinking
• Design mindset
• Initiative, entrepreneurship, and learning by doing
• Moving towards jobs with purpose and meaning
• Critical Thinking
• Curiosity
• Flexibility and Adaptability
• Courage
• Empathy
• Ethical Judgement
• Spirituality

Update knowledge, skills and abilities:

• New technology and new medium literacy
• New ways to coordinate human activity
• New ways to effectively communicate information
• Contextualisation, critical thinking, logic, strategy
• Insight, foresight, imagination, creativity, sense-making, novel thinking
• Balanced emotional, cognitive and social intelligence
• Diversity and cross cultural competency
• Leading by influence

Conclusion

I know, dude. That’s a massive challenge! And it’s exactly because of that we need great leaders like you to step up and lead the way.

“We have few guarantees that we will successfully navigate this transition, or that we will adapt to the realities of the stage that comes next. We shudder at the massive coordination that will be required to survive and thrive in a fully-connected hyper-networked world.

But we cannot let that fear be our guide. Like every rite of passage throughout every human life, these transitions are defined both by their uncertainty and by the personal transformations they facilitate.” — Institute of The Future

What if the same technologies that are disrupting our society are also holding the answers. What if the tools we need are just waiting to be invented. What if, in the end, it is up to us who need to formulate the right questions first!

Blockchain can be a great example of that. From all this amazing exponential technologies, it is definitely the one who can change our society at most. The way it can decentralise institutions and empower people attacks the heart of the world’s worst problems. However, the race is still open. If it will be just another asset exploited by the same status quo (the “1%”), or if it will bring more equilibrium to society, it’s to be defined.

Even more important than giving us functional tools, science can give us ideas. It creates ways of understanding ourselves and they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we are inspired to and how we behave — for example, one of the greatest benefits of Artificial Intelligence is that it helps us to define who we are. Besides that, ideas stick longer than just technologies.

In that way, we can say that human nature is much more created than discovered. The theories that help us to understand ourselves are basically the product of the society in which people live. In the end, human nature is built by designing the institutions in which people live and work.

We are entering into a turning point phase and the question we must ask ourselves is — what kind of life do we want to design?

My personal point-of-view on how to deal with all this stuff

As you probably heard before, life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. So, don’t go crazy with this stuff. Let your brain cook it for a while, use your intuition, and enjoy your life.

Calm and confidence will rise if you let your fear of uncertainty go away. Be aware that pain can be in your way, it is inevitable, but you will be fine anyway. So, the best you can do is embrace it and use it to make you grow as a better person. Don’t be too hard on yourself and be open to test new possibilities. And know that you are definitely not alone.