Employability In Your 50s

Let me gather three questions and elaborate on a reflection about a really hot topic: Be digital and employable in the second half of your life

 Here are the questions: 

• What happened if the attribute that explains employability in a algorithmic model after 2020 were age?-at least in Southern Europe.
• What happened if I accept-let's assume I am in my 50s-the compensation package at a massive layoff at my company and I trade three years of peacefulness in exchange for lifelong full of anxiety and uncertainty?.
• How do you emotionally manage that moment in your career when your sharpest skills (arithmetic, digital skills, analytical skills) are progressively declining for biological reasons?

This article has been previously published in Spanish on blog de Bernardo Crespo under the title of: "Reinventarse en la segunda mitad de tu vida"

CHALLENGE QUEST: TALENT PERSPECTIVE [DEMAND]

If the labor market has failed in its role to reconvert to the competitive needs of a new digital era marked by the omnipresence of artificial intelligence, remote relationships and the penetration of analytical skills; If the possibility of remaining "employable" in the eyes of employers collides with the financial viability of retaining a highly expensive asset (professionals in the second half of their career) in comparison with hungry professionals intensive in new analytical and digital skills; If the population pyramids of the most industrialized countries on the planet are more affected by life expectancy than fertility rates; How do we manage our careers in our 50s? How to neutralize the cost-opportunity imbalance for the second half of a life in an environment of economic shakeout?

Perhaps the eternal issue is having considered that employability is the ability of human beings to adapt to the professional demands of recruiters. Is it possible to create demand if we pose the challenge of companies in a different way? [Data Literacy and new strategic priorities of companies at a competitive level]

Perhaps the slang of recruiters, job portals, digital businesses and job adventure seekers is failing to inhabit the same conceptual territories. Could it be a keyword attribution issue? [Attribution efficiency between current players and supply-demand job allocation tools]

Perhaps how to contextualize the problem has a limited approach if we introduce the geographic filter, why look for employability in your latitude when the talent market becomes less effective by limiting the number of employers and job facilitators? [Promote cross-border collaboration in the search for talent in a pervasive teleworking scheme]

"Perhaps the slang of recruiters, job portals, digital businesses and job adventure seekers is failing to inhabit the same conceptual territories."

CHALLENGE QUEST: EMPLOYER PERSPECTIVE [SUPPLY]

For the last decade, I have been adapting the concept of digital transformation in the professional sphere, in the consultative sphere and in the academic sphere.

Today there are catalysts for allocating the optimal set of skills between jobseekers and employers. Maybe the limitation to solve this problem lies in the scope of the challenge and also in the focus of each and every one of the catalytic agents:

• A regulated education system focused on past demands and with few short-term self-adjustment mechanisms. [Regulated vs. unregulated education: Review of the role of education as a lever for transforming every country]
• A post-graduate education value offer excessively focused on covering trends and hypes in recruitment [Excessive weight of keywords in the face of limited human attention and the proliferation of automated recruitment tools].
• Lack of connection between business unit needs and recruitment departments [Lack of understanding between hiring managers and recruitment managers: Digital Literacy]
• Agents and job intermediaries highly dependent on corporate recruiters' revenue stream and scarce / null orientation towards the needs of less generous employers (startups) [How to solve for entrepreneurial experience in a resume?] 
• Corporate recruiters limited by efficiency guidelines and lacking analytical and tech skills to connect business needs with the available talent pool at their companies. [HR Transformation function]
• Qualified professionals oriented to solve the problem from a traditional approach (employee vision) and with a lack of entrepreneurial appetite to complement accumulated experience with new, more risk-intensive ventures.
• A regulator dominated by the political party industry and more focused on vote casting between electoral periods than on understanding the global competitive context to strategically adapt education for an environment that has already changed.

If the purpose of executive education has always been to improve employability by re-skilling and up-skilling for changing contexts; If the purpose of recruiters and recruiting agencies has been to provide the best demanded talent; If business units err to translate their demands and job specs to recruiters; And if the global context has relocated talent due to the imposition of teleworking by the order of COVID-19, What is the role of data and technology to mitigate the lack of connection among agents catalysts for employability?

How to understand the change that we have experienced in the last 20 years (pervasive digital context) and generate room for adaptation between Education, the Labor Market and the stubbornness of population pyramids? Are we facing a perfect storm for those who face the second half of their lives?

Quoting Carla Aerst in podcast conversation early on this year about EdTech and leadership: "[with regards to digital change] I am not dystopian at all. Sometimes it is more difficult to be utopian than dystopian" . And that will be my mantra in this reflection.

"Transforming a job market requires new ways to reconfigure the talent offer (mix of skills for new people), intensive use of data and technology to fill vision and execution gaps for all agents, data interoperability to optimize talent search, selection and position fitting, and regulators that bring confidence to the equation, based on a holistic understanding of the challenge beyond their short-term interests." 

REFLECTIONS AND SOLUTIONS TO CONNECT SUPPLY AND DEMAND

It is possible that there are two types of intelligence, fluid and crystallized [4] -the first based on rapid reasoning and agility in solving abstract problems, and the second based on associative capacity with previously acquired learning- how can we adapt the labor market to correct the excessive bias towards fluid intelligence, technical skills and specialist experience? Isn't it possible to translate hard skills and soft skills into an exercise of generational mixing? Do we accept generational diversity as a lever for transformation?

Possibly the greatest triumph of welfare economics has been to create a protectionist system for employees throughout their lives. However, the conflict that we have deal with in periods of industrial reconfiguration consists of knowing how to correct the latency of educational systems in the face of the market's demands for technical skills. How can we adapt curricula to new skills without falling into the trap of perishable hypes? Are we not running the risk that after a supply (and demand) crisis like the one that started in March 2020, the adaptation time will be a lustrum? I'm afraid we can't afford it.

Is it possible to optimize skills allocation and redesign talent search?; Is it possible to optimize up-skilling and re-skilling processes to catalyze the economic recovery after a shakeout?; Isn't it possible to recycle a generation from a collaborative and hybrid perspective instead of looking for the same skills in a single talent point? (generational diversity); Is it possible that this economic crisis had introduced a paradigm shift in terms of employability and from now on we cannot think anymore about traditional employees (passive vision of talent management). Maybe we have to become from now on individual agents for the correct allocation of our own skills? What if we were facing a new reality in which new job opportunities were the result of a creative personal skill management from different project providers? [From the traditional concept of employee to a new view: portfolio skill manager for multiple employers].

Why regulate teleworking from a country perspective when talent can circulate freely in a global digital economy? Are we not being slaves to old paradigms or limited by a geographical-country approach dominated by an industry of agents (political parties, politicians, unions and employer associations) whose objectives collide when solving the problem?

• Is it possible to start educating our children in an entrepreneurial view of their own abilities instead of a traditional view as passive agents at the mercy of a not adaptive job market?
• Would it make sense to stop regulating the labor market to accommodate for new players managing their portfolio of individual skills for a cast of global project bidders (cross-border vision)?
• Is it possible that shorter product cycles derived from a digital economy also require shorter employment relationship cycles between corporations and talent portfolio managers? Perhaps it is not a problem of employee loyalty but rather a reconfiguration of the employment relationship and a paradigm shift (corporate needs and talent demands? (The emergence of the new executive gig economy)
• Are we facing a new context in which funding training for a lifetime is a shared responsibility between project providers (former employers) and individual skill portfolio managers (former employees)? Are the latter prepared to design and manage their own Lifelong learning?
• Is it possible to redesign and rewrite the process of publishing job descriptions? May we design and optimize the algorithm for an optimal job supply and demand allocation?
• Would the allocation improve if jobseekers and recruiters will handle the same attributes? And would it improve even more if the rest of the intermediaries will handle the same attributes? [Continuous automation of human-supervised talent search]

Transforming a job market requires new ways to reconfigure the talent offer (mix of skills for new people), intensive use of data and technology to fill vision and execution gaps for all agents, data interoperability to optimize talent search, selection and position fitting, and regulators that bring confidence to the equation, based on a holistic understanding of the challenge beyond their short-term interests. 

The following hand sketch is my exercise of visual simplification of the challenge:

I have personally designed learning roadmaps to bring these new skills together. I teach senior executives who have already internalized the challenge of being individual skill portfolio managers for a cross-border project provider space. I inspire corporations to translate digital transformation into action plans. I collaborate in the construction of advanced analytics based solutions to optimize the correct allocation of both worlds, and from time to time I have also collaborated with headhunters. And despite the above, I could not do all this on my own. You need collaboration, trust and huge dose of curiosity.

TO SUM UP...

In short, these are the strategic changes to enhance the challenge of employability. I have tried to order them to follow a temporal sequence and I have ended up writing a decalogue to reinvent yourself in the second half of your career:

1. [Regulated vs. unregulated education: Review of the role of education as a lever for transforming every country]
2. [Excessive weight of keywords in the face of limited human attention and the proliferation of automated recruitment tools].
3. [Lack of understanding between hiring managers and recruitment managers: Digital Literacy]
4. [HR Transformation function]; [How to solve for entrepreneurial experience in a resume?] 
5. [Promote cross-border collaboration in the search for talent in a pervasive teleworking scheme]
6. [Attribution efficiency between current players and supply-demand job allocation tools]
7. [Data Literacy and new strategic priorities of companies at a competitive level]
8. [From the traditional concept of employee to a new view: portfolio skill manager for multiple employers].
9. [Continuous automation of human-supervised talent search]
10. [New skills]. And this is what comes right ahead.

Possibly, we are facing a new combination of technological and analytical competences, together with new skills that prepare for curious professionals, people who are creative in solving problems, people capable of facing any challenge in a generous manner and people who are masters when it comes to using language to encourage collaboration with a vision never explored before, potential unsustainability.

I firmly believe that curiosity and individual creativity are key to start the challenge.

I am passionate about Lego and the summer before the pandemic I had the opportunity to visit with my son the sanctuary of the Danish brand (Lego House) designed by the innovative architect Bjarke Ingels. Although collaboration is key to generating value in any space, the exponentiality of adding curiosity and individual creativity may be the key for value creation in changing contexts. And simply by connecting the original Lego bricks (2x4), 6 of those original bricks, the number of potential combinations possible is staggering. When I visited Lego House with my son in 2019 I was given my custom 6-brick combination. My personal combo is #585,739,606 out of a total possible combinations of 915,103,765 [5]

Translating this challenge into data, only individual creativity brings a decent amount of possible combinations. Imagine extrapolating the same exercise with a collaborative approach. What's your combo?

It all begins with taking the first step to create. And it all starts with childish madness and the necessary cognitive freedom dose of a kid. Perhaps the best way to reinvent yourself int the second half of your life begins by recovering the creative license of the beginning of the first half of your life. Perhaps connecting creativity and curiosity with the collaboration of all agents of the employability tribe is the best way to regenerate a sustainable space in the face of a change as abrupt as the one experienced. Sustainability in employment or simply sustainability as a challenge to continue creating value in a digital context? I prefer to call it #digitalsustainability.

“Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.” -Jiddu Krishnamurti.

This post is dedicated to #iePDTD9 students of the IX in-take of the Management Program in Digital Transformation at IE Business School. You already have the tool to start creating: Este post está dedicado a los #iePDTD9 alumnos de la IX edición del Programa de Dirección en Transformación Digital.  Ya tenéis la herramienta para empezar a crear:  Alessandro Zappia, Alfredo Leonardo Cerde?a, Andrés Martin Gómez, Daniel Berganzo Salgado, David Gálvez Paniagua, Javier de Mora Navarro, Javier Plazas Arcos, Javier Rodríguez Blanco, Javier Visiers Lecanda, Juan Oyarzabal Lodge, Lucas Pesse, Lucía Miranda Suárez de Puga, Luis Charlo de Paul, Nacho Vijil Cabrera, Paco Arroyo Santander, Teresa Mendez Marin

?Va por vosotros! #beyondDigital #DigitalSustainability

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About Bernardo Crespo:

Certified Ontological Coach by Newfield Network (ACTP ICF Colombia). Bachelor in Business Administration and last year of BA Honors in Management and Economics, University of St Andrews, UK. Master in Relational Marketing, CRM and E-commerce.

Member of the Digital Advisory Board of IE Business School and Academic Director in digital transformation at IE Executive Education. Former Digital Transformation Leader at Merkle Spain and Head of Digital Marketing at BBVA Spain.

Founder and Inspirer of esc-XL.com (Executive Digital Detox), he has been recognized by the newspaper EXPANSIóN in 2016 as one of the 50 greatest experts on Digital Transformation in Spain.

See Keynote Compilation on YouTube