WHAT IS A FUTURE-READY WORKFORCE?

WHAT?IS A FUTURE-READY WORKFORCE?

Introduction

Companies are eager to build workforces that are ready for whatever comes ahead, equipped with the skills and capabilities to not only meet tomorrow's challenges but also to help them capitalize on opportunities and overcome obstacles yet unimagined. Skills and enduring capabilities defined It’s worth defining what we mean by skills and by capabilities because they’re not the same thing. Skills refer to the tactical knowledge or expertise needed to achieve work outcomes within a specific context. Skills are specific to a function, tool, or outcome, and an individual applies those skills to accomplish a given task. Driving, for instance, is a skill. Enduring capabilities, on the other hand, are observable human attributes that are demonstrated independent of context—such as empathy. Unlike skills, capabilities don’t become obsolete; they endure. Moreover, they help us adapt our skills and acquire new ones as we respond to new challenges and opportunities. Skills change, but capabilities endure: Why fostering human capabilities first might be more important than reskilling in the future of work. ?Many companies have responded to the changing nature of work by capitalizing on automation and other technologies. They’re using chatbots, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and other cognitive solutions to add value and improve service and quality. However, technology alone is not enough to enable them to adapt and succeed in a fast-changing world. Workers will need new skills and capabilities—fast—and companies face a daunting challenge: do they invest massive amounts of money today to acquire the skills needed tomorrow, or do they risk trying to compete with an under-skilled workforce? We think there’s another choice that will enable organizations to thrive in the new normal: building a future-ready workforce. There are three key elements to this effort: work (what gets done), workforce (by whom or what), and workplace (where and how). Organizations must re-evaluate the work being done and ensure they are focused on work that creates value for the business. They must then decide who or what should perform that work, by developing a hybrid workforce that combines humans, both as on-balance-sheet employees using new contingent workforce models, and machines. Finally, organizations need to look at where that work will be done and how it will be accomplished, exploring new ways of working that build on what they’ve learned and experienced over the course of the pandemic. This paper focuses on the workforce aspect: how organizations can unleash workers’ potential by equipping them with the skills and enduring capabilities needed to flex, stretch, and evolve to meet challenges now and in the future. Companies and workers alike recognize that work will never be the same again and that continually upgrading skills and capabilities is essential. According to a recent Deloitte survey, three-quarters (74%) of organizations say reskilling their workforce is important or very important to their success over the next 12–18 months, while just over half (53%) say that between half and all of their workforce will need to change their skills and capabilities in the next three years. Workers are well aware of the imperative: 90% say they need to update their skills at least yearly.

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As we begin 2023, we should explore the true meaning of a future-focused workforce. First, we should define a future-focused workforce: Future-focused means how adaptable the organization and its employees are; what are their internal capabilities to scale and find new ways to innovate and stay current; and what is their aptitude to grow the organization and their people? As we have ushered into the new year 2023 and half of the year is only before us, we perceive there will continue to be constant change, attracting and retaining employees will remain a factor, and the ability to innovate and shift will remain the same. The Transformation of L&D, top four areas of focus for L&D programs in 2022 were: Leadership and management training, Upskilling and reskilling employees, Digital upskilling/digital transformation, and Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Focusing on these areas will help to build the key skills for organizations to be future-focused.

?Leadership Development and Essential Skills

?Since the pandemic, whether you call it soft skills, power skills, or essential skills, the importance of leadership development and essential skills has shifted dramatically. The need to work in a remote or hybrid environment, the ability to maintain and enhance productivity, build organizations that are diverse, equitable, and inclusive, and innovate and stay relevant is a challenge. Employees who are agile and have a growth mindset can make effective decisions, work collaboratively with diverse and, often, virtual team members, and will be successful in today’s continually shifting business environment. The ability to think critically, problem solve, or influence decisions can impact an organization’s success from the bottom of the organization all the way up to the top.

Organizations should look at providing learning opportunities to everyone in the organization, no matter what the role. Everyone is a leader and can leverage leadership skills. Helping employees gain, or have access to developing, these skills is essential to the success and growth of the organization. Communication and interpersonal skills help individuals work well with others while time management and problem solving can make employees more valuable and productive.

?Here are some key areas to consider:

?·??????Communications?– Good communication encompasses many facets such as listening, conciseness, body language, open-mindedness, and understanding the correct medium to use. Good communication, whether verbal or written, provide clarity and direction, can prevent, or resolve, problems, build better relationships, increase engagement, build trust, and promote productivity.

·??????Time Management: The ability to meet deadlines and excel, particularly in a remote environment, is based on good time management. Having good time management skills will help to reduce stress, create a better work-life balance, increase productivity, and provide greater focus.

·??????Critical Thinking?– There are several benefits to critical thinking. It reinforces problem-solving skills by helping individuals and teams more effectively diagnose problems, help resolve conflict, encourage curiosity, and foster creativity.

·??????Problem Solving?– This applies to any position or industry. No matter what the business is, problems consistently arise and need to be addressed. Some competencies of problem-solving are emotional intelligence, creativity, lateral thinking, and resilience.

·??????Interpersonal Skills?– We interact with individuals and teams constantly including peers, managers, cross-functional team members, etc. Having effective Interpersonal skills will foster valuable communication, build trust, create and maintain meaningful relationships, demonstrate social awareness, and highlight leadership qualities.

·??????Growth Mindset?– A growth mindset is about how a person will adapt and evolve when facing challenges, learning something new, or having a setback. This is beneficial for both an employer and employee as it helps you and the organization become more adaptable and open to learning and grow, become resilient, and continue to move forward and foster a positive work environment.

Upskilling and Reskilling Employees

?Future skilling employees can be complicated due to continual and rapid changes in the business environment. It’s particularly hard in the tech sector and with general technology since technology changes so quickly. Each organization will need to understand those functional or technical skills that will be required for their specific industry. To keep up, companies need to continually assess and define key skills for one year, three years, and five years in the future. This should not be a one-and-done assessment. It should be reviewed to adjust to the changing business environment. Once the assessment has been completed, organizations need to work with L&D to develop learning journeys and adopt good learning systems.

?Organizations can work with their HR Department, Talent Department, or they can hire a consulting firm to conduct a skills gap analysis. This will help with strategic workforce planning, foster employee engagement, and assist with recruitment and retaining the right talent. Steps to take in a skills gap analysis include: Assessing and prioritizing the common skills needed for all employees and the top specialized skills needed for each role. Map out what learning solution is needed for each of those skills, should it be part of a career path, and determine where and how the content will be delivered. And then create multiple approaches to learning.

?Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

?Learning programs and tools should be looked at across the entire organization and inclusive to reach all employees instead of following traditional talent identification processes which may exclude or miss hidden talent and skills. This approach builds an inclusive environment, increases employee engagement and retention, and builds a sense of belonging.

?Internal mobility

?Company culture is also key to engaging and retaining employees. The opportunities for learning and growth is the first driver of a great culture. A way for employees to grow is the opportunity to apply their skills and talent beyond just their job descriptions. Forward-thinking organizations want and encourage their employees’ interests. Organizations should embrace these desires and allow for internal mobility and fluidity among their employees. This could mean moving into different areas/roles within the company or, perhaps, just enhancing skills to stay relevant within their current role. Opportunities should be made available to participate in stretch assignments or strategic initiatives or to take on responsibilities that are not defined within their current role. Offering advancement and career growth, not only saves time and money in recruitment efforts, but happy and engaged employees are more likely to stay and recommend working at their organization. As we kick off the new year, we know there will still be constant change, attracting and retaining employees will remain a factor, and the ability to innovate and shift will remain the same. ?

Building the future-ready workforce unleashes the potential of your organization and people. The imperative to reimagine the workforce is need of the hour. The imperative to reimagine the workforce Work has been in a state of flux for years, a transformation driven by powerful forces of disruption: demographic shifts, the changing nature of careers, and relentless advances in technology. When the global coronavirus pandemic hit, it pushed the pace of change into overdrive—and heightened anxieties about how to prepare for the future of work. At the same time, organizations worldwide are facing what the World Economic Forum (WEF) has called a reskilling emergency. By 2022, 42% of the core skills required to perform existing jobs are expected to change, according to the WEF, and more than a billion people will need to be reskilled by 2030 as part to meet the desired global reskilling revolution.

?Accessed on February 2021. Organizations will bear the brunt of the responsibility for upgrading the skills and capabilities of their workers. In fact, 73% of survey respondents feel organizations are primarily responsible for workforce development. Employers of all sizes are likely to face rising scrutiny and increasing societal pressure to deliver on these expectations. ?Unfortunately, the companies themselves feel ill-equipped to do so. Most believe they lack the insights and commitment needed to effectively reimagine work and equip workers to meet the business’s needs. To be specific, only 17% of organizations believe they’re able to anticipate the skills they’ll require to any great extent,5 and only 16% expect to make significant investments in learning over the next three years. Combined, this lack of information and investment threatens to thwart organizations’ efforts to build the workforces they’ll need in both the short and long term.

?In this report, we aim to help organizations overcome the obstacles they face in building a workforce for the future. We begin by defining what it means for a workforce to be truly “future-ready,” then provide a four-part framework that outlines the actions organizations can take to rethink how work will be performed and to build the adaptable, resilient, and continuously learning workforce they’ll need. Our goal is to help equip companies with insights and tools they can use to move quickly and with confidence to ensure they and their workforces are ready for whatever the future has in store. “The top skills and skill groups which employers see as rising in prominence in the lead-up to 2025 include groups such as critical thinking and analysis as well as problem-solving and skills in self-management, such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility.

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Companies are eager to build workforces that are ready for whatever comes, equipped with the skills and capabilities to not only meet tomorrow’s challenges but also to help them capitalize on opportunities and overcome obstacles yet unimagined. However, too many organizations don’t know how or where to start. The first step is to understand the key characteristics of a future-ready workforce. A hybrid workforce comprising humans and machines Defining the workforce used to be simple: it comprised the people directly employed by an organization. Today, that definition seems quaintly outdated. The modern workforce often includes contingent workers such as contractors, freelancers, and gig workers, who operate alongside traditional employees. As well, the modern workforce may not be entirely human. Technology has become part of it, performing tasks essential to the business with little to no human intervention: chatbots field customer inquiries; robots handle tedious administrative tasks; drones perform safety inspections; cognitive systems analyze and pull insights from massive amounts of data. Organizations are just beginning to come to grips with the implications and opportunities of this hybrid workforce. To date, they have largely viewed technology as a way to improve the speed and efficiency of work by streamlining and automating processes and eliminating tasks that used to be performed manually. Yet these same technologies also enable companies to completely reimagine and redesign work itself, in a way that enables their human and technological workforces to focus on the tasks at which they excel. Humans can perform those requiring empathy, connection, and imagination, while robots, algorithms, and other technologies can handle routine but vital processes, and make sense of oceans of data far faster and more accurately than any human. Redesigning work in this way can have profound implications for human workers. As technology automates tasks formerly done by humans, organizations can rethink the purpose of all its roles. These redefined roles may require very different sets of skills and capabilities. With drones and sensors monitoring equipment in the field, for example, organizations can refocus their maintenance teams on drawing insights from the analysis provided by the technology to adjust maintenance programs and optimize throughput instead, resulting in much greater value to the business. As the work changes, so do the skills and capabilities needed by human workers. his deeper understanding enables companies to develop an integrated workforce strategy that combines the development of their internal human workforce, highly targeted recruitment, judicious use of contingent workers and third-party organizations, and optimal deployment of technology. A workforce that’s always learning in the flow of work The future-ready workforce is rooted in a culture of continual, lifelong learning that is embedded and integrated into the flow of work itself. This isn’t a fancy way of saying on-the-job training; it’s fundamentally different. It’s embedding learning into activities that are already part of workers’ daily responsibilities, using tools they’re familiar with, to create a highly effective learning environment. It’s learning that’s immediately applicable and available in real-time, when and where it’s needed—a far cry from the traditional, classroom-based learning we have used for so long. The future of workplace learning is: Experiential Connecting to human emotion and relevant experience is key to committing learning to memory. Work-integrated Providing learning to employees when they need it during their day-to-day work makes that learning more applicable, efficient, and memorable. Blended Delivering learning through a mix of digital and hands-on experiences makes it more accessible and scalable. Lifelong Offering of professional and personal development that contributes to workers' ongoing future employability ensures that workers remain relevant and perceive the learning as having value. Organizations that incorporate these four principles into their learning approach will naturally provide their workers with learning that takes place in the flow of work—when and where it’s needed, with practical applications and tangible outcomes.

??A workforce built on enduring capabilities A focus on building and developing enduring capabilities first and necessary skills second is another characteristic of the future-ready workforce. Skills tend to dominate the conversation about the future of work and the workforce. It’s not surprising, because, for much of the 20th century, skills were what companies needed to get work done. That made sense in a world that was stable and predictable in relative terms, and in which companies used repeatable, predictable processes to produce standardized, predictable products. But the world has changed, and skills are no longer the bedrock on which companies operate. Changing customer expectations and technology’s incredible capacity for learning and replicating diverse human skills, from the mundane (e.g., grocery picking and packing) to the highly specialized (e.g., eye surgery), mean that the number and variety of skills required to serve a profitable market are growing faster than a human workforce can possibly learn them. At the same time, skills are becoming less central to creating the type of value that differentiates an organization and enables it to build lasting relationships with its customers. In a world that requires more skills that are refreshed more often, those skills become less important than the enduring human capabilities that enable workers to learn, apply, and adapt them. Some of these enduring capabilities are innate and can be nurtured; others can be developed through learning, experience, and practice. They include: Imagination Seeing through a variety of lenses that challenge existing assumptions about what’s possible. Empathy Understanding and considering the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of others. Curiosity Seeking new information and experiences, striving for greater understanding, and asking questions. Resilience Persisting despite challenges, obstacles, or disruptions. Creativity Innovating, improvising, and using resources in unexpected ways. Emotional intelligence Understanding others’ emotions and experiences and how they shape human interactions. Teaming Collaborating effectively across spatial, organizational, and cultural boundaries. Social intelligence Understanding interpersonal dynamics and behavioral impacts of human interactions. Sense-making Creating meaning and awareness out of collective experiences. Critical thinking Analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and reconstructing information. Adaptive thinking Recognizing new patterns and applying patterns in new contexts.

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Machines may be able to perform many skills done by humans, but humans have an edge in other areas. People are better at connecting with other people and understanding their needs, recognizing and adapting to changing contexts, and developing creative, imaginative new approaches. Organizations that embrace, cultivate, and nurture enduring human capabilities will be well-positioned to gain a strategic advantage in the years to come. Their workforces will have the capabilities to sense and respond to change and to rapidly learn the skills needed at that moment to continue moving forward and thrive in the environment of relentless disruption that is becoming the norm. While organizations are eager to ensure their workforces are prepared, most aren’t sure how to achieve this. They don’t understand, to any great level of detail, what skills workers will need to support their future business strategy. They haven’t determined what skill gaps exist, or how large those gaps are. And they struggle to identify which skills and capabilities to prioritize, and whether to build those skills and capabilities in-house, recruit them in the market, or hire them temporarily as they’re needed. Understanding what the future-ready workforce looks like is just the first step; developing it is a different challenge altogether. This section outlines a four-part framework designed to help organizations understand what decisions and actions they need to take to meet this challenge.

?Deploy workforce planning and analytics to rethink and rearchitect work more broadly Workforce planning and analytics begins by understanding the internal and external factors that will affect an organization’s business and workforce in the years to come. Leaders preparing for the future often start by looking at external data about the skills and capabilities their employees will need. They’ll turn to the World Economic Forum, leading business schools, industry bodies, and other groups for insights and predictions. While these external viewpoints should be taken into consideration, organizations shouldn’t rely on them as an unerring guide to their own needs. Any effort to redesign work and reimagine the workforce must be rooted in the organization’s business strategy and goals. What is the company trying to achieve in the next three to five years? What skills and capabilities are essential to accomplishing those goals? The answers to these questions will be unique to the business, and they may turn out to bear little resemblance to the views of outside experts. The next step is to use analytics to understand the work the organization does at a granular level. What tasks are performed? By whom? Where? The scale of this effort is far too large to be done by human workers within a reasonable timeframe, which is where companies can capitalize on AI-based tools and analytics to look at all the jobs across their enterprise and identify the vast range of tasks that comprise the work done each day. Once this analytics-powered inventory of existing work tasks is conducted, organizations can determine what work needs to be done—and what doesn’t—and figure out the best way to accomplish the necessary work. This exercise leads to defining a “build, borrow, buy” approach to redeveloping their workforce. Skills only needed temporarily may simply need to be borrowed; for example, hiring a consultant for the duration of a project. Borrowing can also be a way for organizations to access skills that are hard to find, difficult to train, or too expensive to hire permanently. Sometimes a skill set is so vital to the company that the only option is to recruit, or buy, the talent directly. But in many cases, the skills and capabilities needed can be built through learning. Workforce planning and analytics also allow organizations to avoid common pitfalls. It mitigates the risk organizations run by pursuing skills that are all the rage, only to find they have little notion of how to capitalize on those skills or that there is little longevity in them. It enables a company to target its learning strategy, avoiding unnecessary costs. And it helps organizations better ensure workers whose jobs are affected are given the opportunity to develop themselves to stay relevant in an ever-evolving labor market.

??CASE STUDY: A consumer goods company uses workforce planning and analytics to understand potential future workforce options—and their impact A global consumer goods company sought a data-driven approach that would enable it to understand the “art of the possible” with respect to its future workforce. The organization wanted to model alternative ways work could be done, focusing on three disruption levers: automation (work), talent (workforce), and location (workplace). It also wanted to understand the implications of taking a conservative, moderate, or aggressive adoption approach with each lever. Using a workforce planning platform, the company developed a work-activity architecture to facilitate a deep dive into the type of work performed by each role at the organization, under categories such as communications, supervision, and problem-solving. A machine learning algorithm was used to generate a disruption model to compare current and future work options in terms of automation, talent, and location; this model was then used to identify gaps between the workforce’s current state and these future-state options. Four scenarios were ultimately developed, each presenting a different potential future state based on the organization’s appetite for disruption and turnover, and modeling the extent and speed of likely impacts. This “art of the possible” analysis demonstrated the potential disruption to the organization, right down to a role level. It also allowed the company to understand the potential impact on its workforce and to identify how to move the workforce toward its future state, including which roles and areas to target first to reach important quick wins.

?Dig deeper by identifying and assessing future skills and capabilities Workforce analytics can also help organizations identify which skills and tasks are most likely to be disrupted, information that is invaluable in determining what work gets done and what kind of workforce is needed to do that work. However, to effectively do this, business leaders will need to get to know the organization like never. The executive leadership may have a sense of the skills and capabilities needed to execute the organization’s strategy over the next few years, but functional leaders and managers—aided by human resources (HR) and learning teams— will need to dig deeper to understand what’s involved in building them and the implications for learning programs and talent strategies. Spending time where the work happens—talking to workers, observing them, asking questions, and even doing their tasks—can be a powerful way for business leaders to develop empathy for and an understanding of workers’ authentic experiences. These interactions and conversations enable workers and leaders alike to get a better handle on the skills and capabilities that need to be developed and how to do so effectively, which in turn can help HR and learning teams develop learning programs and talent strategies that are tailored to the unique situation of different parts of the workforce. At the same time, organizations should also use this opportunity to develop and introduce more data-driven ways to understand, assess, and track the skills and capabilities of their workforce at all levels, especially as their workers acquire them. Organizations should explore how new systems and platforms can support such a data-driven approach, and how they can be integrated into the business so that leaders can access a holistic view of the evolution of the workforce’s skills and capabilities over time.

?A framework for building the future-ready workforce Respond to constant change by modernizing the learning strategy Traditional organizational learning strategies are ideally suited to the stable, regimented workplaces and workforces of years past. They’re highly structured and designed to suit a regular, anticipated intake of learning needs each year. They’re also generally aimed at a broad employee audience and delivered outside work, typically in a classroom-type environment. Such strategies are ill-suited to modern workforces, with their complex combinations of employees and contingent workers collaborating around the clock and around the world. Learning must adjust in response, to be delivered continually and on demand. The only way to do that efficiently is to adopt a new strategy that puts learning right at the point of need, where the work is being done. This enables workers to access the development they require, free from the challenges inherent to traditional learning approaches such as competing for scarce resources. Building a future-ready workforce requires organizations to modernize their learning strategy so that it focuses on providing what workers need and want in a way that’s relevant and in a context that makes sense for each person. Learning functions will need to enhance their capabilities and organizational models to support the development of business-led academies, as well as track similar needs across the business to ensure learning can be delivered at scale consistently and effectively. The effectiveness of this new learning strategy should be measured in terms of improvements to overall worker performance and productivity, not in terms of the number of courses delivered or the time spent training. Assessing the existing learning strategy and the operations of the learning function is the first step in modernizing it. The organization should then establish its future-oriented learning vision and strategy, which should align with its skills and capability development goals and focus on integrating learning and work. Next, the company should develop an implementation roadmap which, together with the vision and strategy, will inform key decisions about the governance, operating model, and technology that’s needed to modernize its learning function. This approach differs from its predecessors in notable ways. For one thing, co-creation becomes an integral part of how learning is created and delivered. If a marketing team requires training, for example, it won’t simply send a request to the learning group. Instead, the learning group will consult with marketing and build a project team that includes marketing representatives to better determine what’s needed and how to deliver it in a contextualized relevant, personalized way. Mature learning organizations also move learning-related decisions much closer to the front lines of the workforce, and this affects how learning is governed. It allows the organization to respond more nimbly as requirements for additional skills and training emerge. Traditional learning governance, such as learning councils that meet quarterly to review progress and ponder next moves, can struggle to keep pace with today’s changing needs, much less tomorrow’s. The future-ready workforce can’t wait six months or more to access important learning; decisions need to be made rapidly to ensure workers have what they need to get the job done. ?

To nurture true potential, reimagine the intelligence of the workforce

?A sociologist explores intelligence through the lens of nature versus nurture and takes a closer look at the impact of epigenetics.

Rethinking Intelligence: A Radical New Understanding of Our Human Potential?(HarperCollins, Spring 2023). Bliss’s research reveals that environments, not genetics, are the source of human intelligence. She points to the infinite potential in each person that can be realized only when toxic stress and inequality are addressed. Rethinking Intelligence?looks at the latest in genetics and neuroscience to give us a new way of thinking about, understanding, assessing, and really living with our intelligence. or our parents, education was everything. Test scores were everything.?Education was a possible way?for us to get to better circumstances, gain access to social mobility, and really come into being American. Intelligence was something you were born with. It was really based on your DNA. We’ve been sold?this lie. We still track students; we still make hiring preferences based on intelligence and aptitude test scores. We still group people according to whether they’re so-called winners or losers of the genetic lottery. But intelligence isn’t genetic.

Up until the early 2000s, we believed that genetics predicted our intelligence and our IQ. We thought that genetics was telling us everybody actually predict how well we would do on a particular test. Science since then has advanced greatly. We’re lucky to have research now that shows us that what genetics gives us is our brain architecture, our basic brain architecture, like the structures of our brain. And it doesn’t give us the quality of our thinking, the quality of our thoughts. It doesn’t tell us where we’re going to end up. Also, neuroscience has taught us that our brains are plastic; we are neuroplastic. That means we can change, and we do change. We are inherently developing and growing all the time, not just in our early childhood, but throughout our lives. Sadly, some scientists, not many, still tell us that genetics is responsible for our intelligence. They tell us that intelligence is just plain DNA science. They tell us that it’s part of our bodies that we have no control over and that there are genetic IQ tests. ?DNA is the best scapegoat. It’s like saying, “We can’t help this. This is just what we’re born with.” We can say we don’t have any responsibility to change our environment.

Yet our environments are everything. Whether we grow up in an environment that is giving us all that we need or one in which there is great scarcity, it’s going to determine how well we do on those tests, in school, and in life. So there is no responsibility if you say that’s just how somebody was born. And we don’t have to?fix the unequal circumstances. It’s expensive to change the healthcare system. It’s expensive to change the education system. It’s expensive to equalize neighborhoods. The allure of DNA is that it absolves us of responsibility.?Whether we grow up in an environment that is giving us all that we need or one in which there is great scarcity, it’s going to determine how well we do on those tests, in school, and in life.

Our environments are everything to our intelligence. we actually define intelligence as learning from our environments. We do this naturally. It’s our human heritage. It’s what we all do best. We like to think of intelligence as the awareness of the learning opportunities in our environments. There are always these different moments where?we can learn from our environments. Based on where we happen to be and what our cultures are prioritizing for us, we’re going to focus on those things and not on other things. So instead of seeing intelligence as a score or a number, it’s important for us to see that environments are everything. There’s another aspect to the environment, which is that our environments, and the quality of those learning environments, are crucial as well. One of the hardest things to know about our brains and our bodies is that there is a toxin in our environments, in almost all our environments. That is stress.?Stress is so toxic?to us. Yet we live and work in stressful environments. Many schools are stressful environments, especially the schools that are the most under-resourced. They are very stressful environments. We must look at the quality of the environment. One thing that most people don’t realize is that stress is so toxic to us that it can change our DNA. It can modify our DNA. We pass those modifications down to our children. Our children pass them on to their children, and so on. We must focus our attention, our research, and our resources on fixing the environment if we want to have people thrive.

The first thing wants to do is shift our mindset from seeing people as their test score or some kind of quantity or number or fixed score. Shift from seeing people as being better than, worse than, lesser, smarter, dumb, dumber, failures—and shift from seeing we that way—to seeing the infinite ability of all humans.

We have infinite ability, and we have infinite potential. We have the potential to seize the learning moment in our environments. No matter how neurotypical or neurodivergent we seem, we are doing that. That’s the natural ability we learn from our environments. We improve our circumstances. We move forward. ?Learn a little, rest a lot. Learn a little more, rest a lot more, and so on. It’s just about seeing that it’s our job to empower ourselves and empower others by seeing that infinite potential. We also need to lower stress. That is tricky because we don’t have control over everything in our environments. We can’t control our workplace culture all by ourselves. We can’t control the structure of our jobs. We can’t control the most intense stressors that exist in just about every environment we find ourselves in, [such as] racism, sexism, homophobia. These are things we have to chip away at over time. We really need to start to think of the things that we can control and do something about those.

We can’t control the most intense stressors that exist in just about every environment we find ourselves in, [such as] racism, sexism, homophobia. These are things we must chip away at over time. We really need to start to think of the things that we can control and do something about those. Take it day by day. Really see that this is the most beautiful thing about being a human being. We are naturally growing and developing. We are naturally learning from our environments. This is something that we do without even trying. We have to think, “Okay, this is a process that is going to go on our whole life. The quality of our environments is something we have to think of in a systemic way, and not just in the way of trying to improve our own circumstances, but really equalizing the environment for all.

?Conclusion

?In the past hundred years, the world of work has undergone a continuous evolution. The steady push of technology and the rise of the digital workplace have shaped not only how and where we work, but also the nature of the roles and skills required in a highly dynamic working culture. The working world continues to evolve,?requiring?business leaders to look for innovative solutions that will support?the?workplaces?and?workforces of the future.?

·??????Distributed workforces: How and where we work:?Until very recently, a mobile device was simply a phone – but today, smartphones are used by workers as portals for increasingly sophisticated software and data management tools.

·??????Changing roles in a digital workplace: As the use of?AI in the workplace?increases, so does the demand for roles that are primarily knowledge-based and cognitive. And despite concerns about humans being pushed out of the workforce by AI and robots, the forecast is actually much rosier than many may think.

·??????Demand for new skills in the workplace of the future: As the digital workplace reduces the need for an on-site workforce, it also increases the need for knowledge-intensive tasks. From 2000 to 2019, the proportion of employees with graduate-level qualifications rose from 24% to 42%. Other studies and statistics also show a nearly 20% rise in the past 10 years in jobs calling for evidence of complex problem-solving and innovative thinking. And, of course, a sophisticated level of computer and software literacy is basically essential for the workforce of the future.

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