Learning, exploration, and transformation, key actions to achieve our best version

I decided to look for information about the layoffs that are affecting the software industry since last year. How many people have been affected?, which are the most impacted industries?

I found interesting articles and sites with most updated information about this phenomenon, I can't confirm if this is accurate, but that information helped me to get some context about the current situation.

First, I was surprised about "quit hiring", a practice followed by many companies that completely stopped hiring new people and put a great effort promoting employees for their open positions. The practice of "quit hiring" was raised due to the economic recession that many companies started to face since last months.

Here you can see an article from Gartner describing the benefits of adopting this practice for the companies and for their employees.

The second interesting point that I found, is a site which provides relevant indicators about people laid off since the beginning of the pandemic until now.

That site provides graphs with data about number of employees fired and number of companies that made the decision to laid off:

This graph helped me to understand that the highest peaks of lay offs were achieved in November 2022 and January 2023, and it also helped me to see that this phenomenon has raised considerably since June 2022.

In the other graph, we can see the same data per quarter of the year since the beginning of the pandemic:

Finally, the last graph provides data per industry, so this information is useful to understand what industries have been the most affected by layoffs in 2023 against 2022.

The most affected industries in 2023: retail, consumer, hardware, healthcare, food, and the less affected industries: Marketing, Data, Security, Education, Media, Travel, Real Estate.

Here you can read the full report referred in previous paragraphs.

Then, I decided to take time to read about technological trends, political and social economic factors that could be affecting us now.

The World Economic Forum, published its report called: Future of work 2023. This is a very interesting report were we can find forecast and estimates using as reference information provided by some of the biggest companies around the world.

This report says that the global inflation (8.8%) we had last year (2022) slowed down the expected economic growth from 3.8% to 2.9%, and it caused that many banks increased their interest rates.

I experienced different emotions while I was reading the report.

First, I was able to confirm that 75% of the companies surveyed will be looking to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, big data tools and cloud computing. Many of these companies are considering that these technologies will be generating the most meaningful impact in the next years.

Then, I felt surprised when I read that the job positions with most of the posts in Linkedin between 2018 and 2022:

1. Talent acquisition
2. Sustainability analyst
3. Sales development representative

There was something else interesting that I found here, it was about the main business practices adopted by the companies to attract people:

1. Support to improve people career development and internal promotion processes.
2. Offer high salaries.
3. Support to provide training plans for upskilling and reskilling.
4. Structure and tell better the purpose and impact of the company.

I felt positive when I read about the abilities that humans could use and improve to differentiate from artificial intelligences:

• Analytical, creative, and critical thinking.
• Curiosity and long life learner attitudes.

I mitigated a little bit my anxiety about the future when I read in the report that most of the companies are planning to keep adopting new technologies because they are considering that this is key for business transformation and optimization.

I felt confused when I read about jobs creation and displacement, specifically for product managers and software testers, since these roles are described as the ones that will have more jobs displaced than created in the next four years, I would like to further research this. Here is a link to a post where is discussed one of the possible reasons about why Product Managers could be displaced in the near term.

Another interesting indicators for jobs creation and displacement:

The three principal jobs with highest rate of growing for the next four years:

1. AI and Machine learning specialists
2. Sustainability Specialists
3. Business Intelligence Analysts

Jobs with 25% of increasing:

• Ecommerce specialist, Digital marketing and strategy specialists, Business Development professionals.

Jobs with less than 25% of increasing:

• SW app developers, project managers, profesores para universidad y educacion superior, profesores de educación vocacional.

Jobs with similar rates of creation and displacement:

• Specialists in training and development.

Jobs with higher rates of displacement than creation of new ones:

• Product managers
• Software testers
• Relationship managers
• Social media strategist

In this report I found a forecast which confirmed that the main training priority considered by the companies between 2023 and 2027 is analytical thinking followed by creative thinking as the second priority. Additional to this, 42% of the surveyed companies are considering to run artificial intelligence and big data trainings for the next years.

Lastly, I would like to highlight the main points that surveyed companies are considering when they are hiring people for a job position:

1. Assessment of people experience.
2. Assessment of people skills.
3. Completion of academic degree. ?
4. Completion of courses or online certificates.

Source of all of this information: The future of jobs 2023, World Economic Forum.

The forecasts and estimates previously shared could be used as reference to make decisions about the abilities to upskill and reskill.

The development of soft skills requires to be considered seriously in our agendas.

As a self-reflection exercise, I would like to share some points posted in LinkedIn by Leo Piccioli related to the abilities that humans should take into consideration in an era of a high evolution of artificial intelligence, and I would like to share some of the questions that we may ask ourselves about those abilities.

Your capacity for adaption is considered a key skill to adapt us into new environments, processes, people, and perhaps new dynamics to generate money.

• How would you improve your ability for adaption??
• Which would be the most impacted area of your life if you improve in 10x your ability for adaption?

Your ability for resilience is essential to not give up when things don't work as expected.

• Do you remember situations when you acted with high resilience? How did you feel? What kept your motivation at the top?
• Do you remember situations when you lacked of resilience? What had you done distinct?

Your ability to learn, will be valuable to stay continuously in the cycle of learning, unlearning and relearning again and again according to the changes in the environment.

• How could you improve the speed and effectiveness of the things learned day by day?
• How to avoid the trap of EGO and stay open to different opinions than yours? How to improve the way we listen actively to others while we look for new knowledge?

Your ability to be creative will be crucial to explore and ideate combinations of practices, tools and knowledge that could add more value to life of people.

• What kind of opportunities could you seize to improve your creativity substantially?

Your ability for self reflection could help to know and understand better to yourself, it could help to remember who you are and why you do what you do.

• How often do you practice self reflection? What kind of benefits did you get from it in the past?

Finally, your personal values deserve a special mention. In my opinion, this is something that provides direction to the destination that you want to achieve.

• Do you remember when, and why you adopted your personal values?
• Would you be able to adopt new values and leave the ones that stuck your life?

But, what is beyond of upskilling and reskilling?

From my perspective, the first thing is the quantity and quality of the relations we have with others: our networking.

• How many friend relationship you could nurture more?
• What kind of communities you could be joining? What kind of learning you could get from there and give to them? How many new friends you could make?

The second thing, is about your talents and how the world could benefit from it:

• Which of the projects were you worked left the most greatest lessons learned? Should these lessons be shared with the world because they will help to add value to the people that buy your products or hire your services?
• What is stopping you of creating your blog or video sharing what you do and how you do so others can learn?

Creo que navegar las olas del cambio con mayores posibilidades de éxito, requerirá mucho de nuestra parte.??Hasta el día de hoy, no he encontrado una fórmula exacta para llegar al destino. Pero si hay acciones determinantes con la que podríamos explorar este camino:?

I think we need to do a lot if we want to navigate through the waves of change successfully, there is not an accurate formula to resolve the situation of being affected by layoffs, but there are key actions that we could follow in our journey to the success:

Staying all the time in exploration, learning and transformation, and receive the lessons we are learning with gratitude and appreciation.