Curious shift from HR to P&C, part 5: skills for a thriving future

Skill development is the foundation of a thriving future.

Last week, World Economic Forum (WEF) released its latest?Future of Jobs Report 2023. [1] I consumed various posts and articles regarding its predictions, all of which echoed the same narrative; the impact of AI, digitalisation and a net deficit of job growth by 2027. Nonetheless, it seems only a handful bypassed the corporate echo chamber and actually read the 295-page report.?

Where are the creative, critical thinking, and analytical skills when we need them the most? Ironically, these are the same future skills which corporate executives refer to as "significant".

My take: Let's consider the report an anonymised survey of targets and priorities in corporate business plans; as a summary for reading the lines between corporate sustainability and ESG disclosures.?

Notice the cognitive dissonance - about labour, merged into the future of work - that applies to the statements we would call?greenwashing?in an environmental context. Corporate executives practice business and people management the same way yet expect a different outcome. These practices have accelerated externalities, increasing pollution, consumption rates and inequality. Planting some trees elsewhere or sending displaced citizens into the void won't reduce the damage done, just as philanthropy doesn't address the consequential equity crises. The future of skills shouldn't become a net deficit of jobs similar to the effect of corporate net zero pledges. These aren't signs of a thriving job market and a regenerative economy.

Companies voice the urgent need for skill development, even prioritising some skills over others. However, these skills may differ greatly from what the world needs for green or just transition - for ecological regeneration, societal thriving or economic sufficiency.?

These skills may also differ from what the workforce, the customers, or society need. As such, they may escalate the marginalisation and income gaps of those seeking to contribute to something more than C-suite compensation while waiting for the axe to fall in the round of layoffs. Which is sure to come.?

The true value of human abilities is yet to receive a fair assessment.

They are the sum of learnings, potentials, aspirations, integrity, ethics, motivation, self-esteem, fears, and goals — much more than education, job titles, job descriptions, referrals, and achievements. For too long, employers haven't reckoned with the available in-house skills, their missing value in the P&L, or all the skills needed to work effectively and yield more than they cost. Even today, external parties like this platform know more about the employees than the companies themselves. Unfortunately, frivolous pet projects have shelved such assessments, continuously deferred as "unnecessary for now". You bet it's necessary now, but those impartial assessments are still nowhere to be found. Workers have to upgrade their skills every 4-5 years; otherwise, they fall behind in the hustle built by short-term corporate wins.

Workers have been worried about machines taking jobs for a long time. As early as 1930, John Maynard Keynes was warning about the new curse of technological unemployment, which he depicted as "unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor." [2] In short, automating ourselves out of a paycheck.

In any case, widespread pledges to 'upskill and reskill' align primarily with business growth prerequisites and technology-powered business-as-usual. Rather than running a gap analysis between what's needed and what's in-house, what's to grow, hire, buy, or outsource, executives draw insights from consulting playbooks. As a result, there is a growing gap between what companies offer as internal skill training and what the workforce considers relevant for thriving and moving ahead in the labour market.

Here are some excerpts from the WEF report:

1) What companies say is important:?

• "identifying skills gaps and an inability to attract talent [are] the key barriers preventing industry transformation"
• "two-thirds of companies expect to see a return on investment on skills training within a year of the investment, whether in the form of enhanced cross-role mobility, increased worker satisfaction or enhanced worker productivity."
• "48% of companies identify improving talent progression and promotion processes as a key business practice that can increase the availability of talent to their organization, ahead of offering higher wages (36%) and offering effective reskilling and upskilling (34%)." (pp.7)

2) What they are willing to invest in:?

• "the skills that companies report to be increasing in importance the fastest are not always reflected in corporate upskilling strategies",?
• "to close skills gaps, respondents expect to reject external training solutions in favour of company-led initiatives",?
• "investing in learning, on-the-job training and automating processes are the most common workforce strategies which will be adopted to deliver to their organizations business goals"?(pp.7)

3) What employees say about their jobs:?

• "six in 10 workers will require training before 2027, but only half of workers are seen to have access to adequate training opportunities today." (pp.7)
• "worker surveys at both CultureAmp and Randstad suggest that salary levels are the main reason workers decide to change their job."
• "92% of respondents to Randstad's employee survey say job security is important and more than half of these respondents wouldn't accept a job that didn't give assurances regarding job security."
• "data suggests that fewer women than men are trained"
• "57% of surveyed employees are pursuing training outside of work, because company training programmes do not teach them relevant skills, advance their career development or help them stay competitive in the labour market."
• "criticize companies for focusing their efforts too much on managers' development, skills and rewards.
• "only 36% of non-managers who responded to Adecco's survey said that their company is investing effectively in developing their skills, compared to 64% of managers."?(pp. 15)

While workers ask for job security, livable pay for performance and relevant job experiences, they get company perks and insincere (or irrelevant) training credentials.

Stages of denial

With irregular skill demands comes the denial of what skills are needed for a thriving future.?

Many future skills named by executives - especially resilience, flexibility, curiosity, life-long learning, motivation and agility - stem from a safe and stable childhood supported by affordable education and parents' steady employment. Executives, while eyeing exponential opportunities and gains due to new technologies, wouldn't promise job stability to today's workforce. The foundational requirement for securing a workforce "fit-for-future" is reinforcing safety - offering some feeling of job security.?

C-suite actions and business practices directly conflict with what they say is needed. Their expectation is as short term as it gets: "expect to see a return on investment on skills training within a year of the investment, whether in the form of enhanced cross-role mobility, increased worker satisfaction or enhanced worker productivity". Historically, executives phased out well-paying middle-class jobs, moved to gig work, infantilising job design, downsizing, outsourcing and continued layoffs. A reaction we could also count on this time.

Will the future productivity gain by AI remain in the coffers for future stock buybacks, bonuses or M&A investments? We can assume so since many companies don't plan to handle human collateral damage. It's not their responsibility; it's just business. The societal disruption doesn't appear on their balance sheet, so why would they bother? Yet, at the same time, the same companies lobby politicians not to be held accountable either. Ultimately, taxpayers - mostly income-based, not corporate tax - must cover the work and inequality gap with food and housing subsidies. So who should invest in the social safety net against disruptions if not those who advance those disruptions and whose businesses benefit from them??

Workforce, Development and Planning

It's also time to bust a common myth about corporate strategic workforce planning. Supporting tomorrow's business goals; ideally, experienced and integrated executives know where, what, and whom the company wants to be in 5 years. Such executives have a well-established imagination to maintain market relevance and a licence to operate. They offer what the world needs, not just what brings in revenue.

Their qualities are in the systemic understanding of what makes the company successful aside from profit margins. They understood how experienced and knowledgeable staff (their system of profound knowledge, skills, interactions, and bottom-up insights) would move the needle towards the next era, even during uncertain times. These leaders, executive or not, had the courage and the evidence-based confidence to entertain ideas without accepting them. Their skills, voice and mindset created spaces for disagreement, a democratic agora of thoughts, working out good ideas' weak points.

Their imagination of future skills stands derived from a strategy that emphasises a business operating model with a holistic yet nuanced positive impact on people and the planet. In this vision, profit is not a goal but a sufficient outcome.

However, those leaders we would need today started going extinct a decade ago, thanks to leadership development and corporate culture trends. Their ability to contradict and challenge idiotic ideas drew opposition, which upended promising career trajectories when losing out to a "less difficult" contender. But, whether they leave voluntarily or not, they leave a void that slowly fills up with obedience and concealed opinions. Their absence and voice of reason. Obedience often emerges from the silence without the safety of their dissenting words. Speaking truth to power, like whistleblowing, is a democratic value that most executives don't appreciate, which I will explore in the next instalment of this series.

Knowing what stakeholders will want in 5 years is like designing furniture for future consumers; it may flop, or it might work. But, since most corporate transformations fall well below expectations [3,4], we can safely assume more labour bloodshed will happen to save an executive or a P&L.

Those left behind are willing to push the specific narrative and playbook dutifully. These people cherish the paycheck and resume-boosting promotion as a compromised reward for their - often brief - services. This Future of Jobs report is their imagination about our collective future.

Yet, I cannot see the thriving qualities.?

On the contrary, the forecasted top skill in big data analysis and AI foreshadow an age of darkness and more detached digital teams utilising data without knowledge and context. A fine-tuned corporate machine that runs without considering humans in the equation. "Waiting for machines to spit out a more palatable and/or profitable answer is not a cure for this crisis, it's one more symptom of it." [5]

1. Future of Jobs Report 2023. World Economic Forum. Accessed on 1 May 2023 via https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023
2. Pecchi, Lorenzo, and Gustavo Piga, editors. Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. The MIT Press, 2008. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhftz. Accessed 9 May 2023 via https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhftz and https://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
3. Philip Kotter. Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. Harvard Business Review. Vol. 73, no. 2, 1995, pp. 59. Accessed on 30 Apr 2023 via https://hbr.org/1995/05/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail-2
4. Paul A. Argenti et al. The Secret Behind Successful Corporate Transformations. Harvard Business Review. vol. 99, no. 7. 2021. Accessed on 30 Apr 2023 via https://hbr.org/2021/09/the-secret-behind-successful-corporate-transformations
5. Naomi Klein. AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are. The Guardian. Accessed on 8 May 2023 via https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein