The Future of Work - meet Career Explorer and Futurist Albert Ca?igueral

Albert Ca?igueral is an explorer, consultant, writer and speaker focused on the social and economic impacts of digital innovations that are poised to change society in the next decades.

He specializes in The Future of Work and Workers, Digital Platforms, and Public Policy affecting Cities, and his work looks at disruption caused by the digitization of companies, governments and public agencies. Albert is the Spain & Latin Americas Connector for the Ouishare network, putting him at the forefront of the digital social innovation movement.

Before his “explorer” career, Albert spent 10 years working for a Digital TV/Communications multinational, and spent two years living in Taiwan and exploring Asia. We at Xperienceships caught up with Albert to ask him about what his work as an explorer actually looks like, and what he has learned about the changing future of work given the digital revolution that he is at the forefront of.

Albert's new book, El trabajo ya no es lo que era: Nuevas formas de trabajar, otras maneras de vivir (Work is not What it Was: New Ways of Working, Other Ways of Living) is out now to pre-order.

Read our full interview below or visit our YouTube channel to watch a short clip.

Xperienceships: As we’re talking about career exploration for students, Albert, we wanted to ask you what your first job was.

Albert: My first paying job was as a painter when I was a teenager during summertime in July and August, painting my own school! I was very close to the school managers who hired a number of students to paint the school during summertime.  After university education, I went into the public television as an engineer at the public TV station, TV Catalonia. I was doing a little bit of research and development work for digital television.

X: How do you think your formal university studies prepared you for what you do now?

A: I was lucky at that university because we were the pioneers. It was the first batch of a new career. So basically, nobody knew what we were doing. Everything was very on the spot, inventing and creating. So it was very unstable. So we ended up being prepared for instability and to work as a team, because we were a small group of 20 or 30 students.

The program was Multimedia Engineering, but it was the late 90s. So: CD-rom, VR glasses and 3d animation was very, very nascent. It was the beginning of Java, the beginning of the web. Nobody knew about these topics and they could not teach us.

So we actually had to self- dedicate a lot. Really the most useful part of my studies from university was the social experiences. Because a lot of the things I was learning are highly technical, and nowadays are from history, the coding languages I was using, or even just the software I was using, does not exist anymore. Because a lot of these topics were not well documented, we had to do a lot of self education and learn by ourselves with our colleagues. We learned to work as a group to defend our needs, and then a lot of self education and self exploration, because the topics were really new, and there was not enough material to teach them.

X: How would you describe your current job?

A: (Laughs). We decided to define ourselves as explorers because we try to be at the edge of the impacts of technology and society: digital technologies. Things are moving very fast. So we decided that to be an expert was not the right choice because we cannot be an expert on things that are moving targets. Everything is changing every week. So it's more having this mentality of explorer; of having curiosity, being a constant learner. Then from what we learned we deliver in terms of consultancy, teaching, writing, different different forms of knowledge, knowledge management. 

In my case, I'm specialized in the future of work, and the impact of digital platforms on this topic. I would say that especially this idea of constant learning, exploring and understanding being on the edge, this is what I learned, what I can translate from my university days to my current job.

X: So tell us a bit more about your projects. And at the moment, what's a typical workday like for you? Is there a typical workday for you?

A: I don't have a typical work day because I'm a freelancer. So every day and every week is a little bit different. But I spend 25% of the time managing customers' projects, trying to do the back office and the administrative work: this is something that freelancers need to do. 

Hopefully you spend 50-60% of your time delivering value - actively producing content (in my case it's writing, or writing for blogs or books or giving lectures or public speaking). It can be for larger organizations like the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC, an external consultant for an app to some local universities where I've been teaching about digital platforms. And also I do consultancy with the Catalan government, for example.

Or it could be coffee with a group of operatives here who are trying to work together - as a group of cooperatives, so a very different range of projects. And then I would say another 20-30% of my time is social interactions with my colleagues that we share, because we are a distributed team. I keep in touch with them to know what's going on, we try to meet virtually or physically, and then also share a lot of information with my professional contacts. Many of them are friends, also. So maybe the information and social contact gives me an edge. I need to have a lot of sensors and have a lot of inputs. It's pretty diverse.

X: What's amazing is that nobody in school or university says to you, this is an option for living your life. This is a way to have a job which keeps you networked, keeps you researching, keeps you interested in things, it means that you travel, it means that you work across different sectors. How do you explain that job to a young person?

A: Oh, yeah, that's a difficult thing.

My friends and my parents think I am a spy because they have a vision of me traveling and doing strange things from time to time and I'm on the media!

X: You're a spy for the future of work! We love what you were saying about needing to stay connected to other people to be up to date. It reminds us of talking to David Price, who's described his job as being an education futurist. He said 70% of the learning that you actually do is done on the job, 20% by connections and collaborating with others and 10% is actually spent in formal training, but the investment that companies spend on training is reversed. 

A: It makes perfect sense to say, to stay up to date and to train myself, I basically have to make sure that I am connected to others and that I'm doing it in my own way. I go to formal conferences or I'm investing in doing a course, but you're learning in a really informal way. And I think that's an important aspect of the future of learning.

I would say what I've learned also is to share what I learned. To consolidate my learnings also, because I read a lot of things, which can be very random. Sometimes you need to write it down, make it a concise form of an article, or some kind of report or something that helps to make sense of all these inputs. 

When you share what you learn in a proper way, you also get the reactions of other people who are exploring the same space so it's important to be visible in your learning and your exploration. Randomly some people will contact you and say, ‘I'm doing something similar”. So for me part of this learning is sharing my learning with the world, which may be obvious for some people that might be more advanced, but for other people who might be at the same level of learning, that will be very interesting for them. 

And it also is important, I think, to try to find information that contradicts your own thinking. So just spend some time exploring uncomfortable spaces or people who might have the opposite idea of what you're trying to, or what you think it's correct or where you think it's a trend.

X: You're probably the first person to say that in this series, but I think everybody would agree with you. It's becoming easier to be in echo chambers, and to be in a bubble of your people who think like you. Can you give us an example of a way of thinking about the future of work that is different from what you think that you've come across recently? 

A: I mean, for that diversity of feelings and opinions for example, there's this very hot topic on the workers classification, for delivery drivers, for Glovo, Deliveroo, Uber Eats around the world. I try to immerse myself in all these. Some of them want to be independent workers, they have more right-wing thinking, they see themselves as small entrepreneurs. And then I also take part in groups which are more left-wing oriented, they want to be employees, they want more traditional work status and protections. Both of them are right for different reasons. And both of them are wrong for different reasons. And it's important to, to understand from the inside, what's what's going on. Probably the truth will be somewhere in the middle. 

I would say the future of work, the way to go is a cooperative approach. Platform cooperativism: how can workers be the owners of the code of the digital platform? We are so dependent on this technology that we should be more in control of the technology that is shaping our lives. So there's a trend of these platform cooperatives - it's still very academic, and relatively small impact. Yet I try to keep a close eye on it, and to interact with them. It’s a little bit Utopian at the moment, but I think this is the right way to go.

In order to progress and to advance in certain directions is important and we have people who are defending several utopian positions. It’s important to be exposed to all these different realities.

X: What do you think will be the future of career exploration in terms of students now leaving University, or leaving school? What will be different for them about the way that they decide what careers to do or how they test careers?

A: With qualifications and with reputation, people will be able to access the next suitable job, so it's important to have all these credentials, all the digital reputation that enable them to access better positions.

I've seen people who specialized on on a given topic and they then spread it via different in different sectors, in different formats, let's say maybe they are very good at one given coding language and they use it in the chemical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and in the aeronautical industry, because this is their skill. And they can then move in different sectors. 

You also can be specialized in one sector and have several skills. Maybe I like a lot of new music. So I can do a podcast with music, and I can write music, and I can have a blog about music, and I teach about music or whatever. My topic is music and then I do a lot of different things. So that's another career path that some freelancers are taking: to have several skills in a given topic. And now you'll see people who are mixing everything, so probably the career path is a mix in between the specialized in one topic and the specialized in one technology.

For me what is important is to do it in a collective. Trying to do that on your own can be relatively boring and difficult. So find your peers! John Hagel is an interesting person to follow, he is always talking about this group of 10-15 people which are your learning groups. And because you are committed to do collective learning together, and it's a relatively small group, you have a lot of personal trust and personal commitment for being part of this group. And I think the future of the career will be not so individual, it will be more in which collective do I want to be connected with.

We can see that with programmers or with musicians, as the forefront of what we can expect in the future of work, I would say focus on the artist and the artisans. They have been working as peers, as a group, as a collective. So, we have a lot of things to learn from them. Programmers and coders are in such high demand, they can work on what they want, how they want. They also are ushering in a utopian approach - they organize their working lives as they prefer. Keep an eye on these two fronts, in order to understand what might be coming for the future of work and the future of careers.

X: Could the Patreon users and the Etsy users be a symbol of what's coming? The artisan economies, where people who made something small in their homes or who had a passion for something could suddenly have this global market. Are we speaking enough about that process? It seems like a really distant possibility for a student at the moment to take that passion, make something out of it, whether a blog or a podcast, or music or whatever, and be able to live from that. We tell them that’s not possible.

A: I would only challenge this narrative in elite sports or even elite video gamers. We tend to focus on individuals who succeed because they are the best in the world, but not everybody can be the best in the world. That's why I insist on being in a collective. 

There may be a few musicians who are the top musicians and they can actually have a good living out of that. But most of the amateur or professional musicians will be playing in two or three bands, with some colleagues. We always focus on the super duper YouTuber, the super duper blogger, the super duper Etsy seller. And there's a lot of average: the elite is not so numerous. So it's important to understand that you might just be part of a collective who's doing cool things because maybe by yourself because you don’t have all the skills or capacities, or all the access to the market. So it's important, I insist on being with other peers.

X: As we can see right now, everybody is trying to learn how to work better, smarter online, and to be more effective. What do you think digital transformation has already done for our working lives? And what can we do to stay up to date?

A: We have so many impacts that it's difficult to answer concisely! One of them is telepresence, an obvious impact of digital technologies at work, we don’t need to be physically present in the same space to actually work together, or to deliver digital work. 

That seems obvious now, but it does feel like a new trend for a lot of people. And that's important too. We also have digitally-enabled support for your work. It can be in the form of robots (that can be your cobots, coworking in the form of a robot), or even AI that will assist in your work. 

So it's important that we also expand our capabilities by interacting with these new technologies, otherwise we will be out of the market. For me that the largest impact or the biggest impact is the fragmentation of work. We tend to think of the work relationship or something very long term, which is the traditional narrative. The factory worker for 40 years is still in the collective narrative, and the collective imagination. 

Because of the possibility of chopping projects and tasks into smaller bits and assigning these projects to different people in different parts of the world, we'll see more fragmentation of these work relationships. It can be for a week, it can be for a day, or a year, but this narrative of the continuous work relationship, I think, needs to be challenged, and digital technologies are pushing us into this direction. Both companies and workers will see some of the benefits of breaking with this traditional narrative. And this is for me the largest and the biggest impact on digital technologies in the future of work: fragmentation, which is highly challenging. It provides a lot of opportunities and a lot of challenges.

X: It sounds fantastic: you can work for multiple clients and you can have a portfolio career and pick up different skills. But on the other hand, it must frighten people in that former narrative as it sounds very unstable. Where are the places you would go to stay up to date, for someone young who's starting to explore?

(Laughs). The sweet spot would be to have a part time traditional job, where you have the security or even access to social protection, a regular income, (maybe work in the mornings or work two or three days a week in a traditional job in a traditional setting, as an employee), and then spend the rest of the time freelancing. So you can have a foot on each side and see where you are more comfortable.

You also need to learn to have a financial strategy for yourself. At any point (like now with Coronavirus), maybe your income will go down. So it's important that you have some savings or you know how to reduce your expenses drastically if necessary. I would appreciate that universities and high schools can actually teach a little bit: I'm very passionate about that. 

And do it with other people! All these problems will seem a lot more complex if you are isolated. If you can share these financial challenges, or have strategies with other people who are in the same situation, you probably have better, smarter and faster solutions ?

The Xperienceships Thought Leadership Series can be viewed in full here. For more information about how we help students and educators explore the future of work, visit our website or get in touch.