Tech and the workforce of the future

Tech transforms work for people. People determine the future of work.

Look around, we are alive in a time of transformation. IT and AI have seemingly brought the future into the here and now, and everything is changing. The thing that hasn’t changed, is that people will determine how the future of work pans out.

Learning in the time of transformation

New tech unveils new possibilities and challenges for people to leverage and contend with. As a result, learning something new is a daily occurrence for everyone. For the older workforce, learning something new is a recurring event and sometimes could just be new jargon or social expressions. This clearly indicates that change is upon us and is gaining momentum, sometimes faster than we may like. It is people’s willingness to learn new things and adapt to change that will be vital skills for employment in the future.

Planning for an evolving future

The future, like the present, will be a constantly changing landscape. A globally shifting political, social, economic and environmental dynamic will impact society and how we work. Technology will both create new jobs and make some others redundant, just like older technology did almost two centuries ago. When factories and the shift system were new and the alarm clock hadn’t been invented, working people paid others to wake them up in time for work.   

People at the forefront of change

The success of technology is more about how people use it than how innovative it is. This is why product design and development cannot be left exclusively to technology experts, and why HR professionals need to understand how technology works. Businesses need the foresight, commitment, and will to attract the right people and hold onto them through this transformation. How people — employees, customers and associates — react to the challenges and opportunities now, will determine the course that the future of work will take.

Here’s why people will determine the future of work: 

• People’s choices define the world we live and work in
• People, diverse as they may be, have similar needs and aspirations
• People create and develop technology
• Only people can perform several specialized jobs
• People have abilities like creativity, leadership, and empathy, which are in great demand
• People can adapt, to better traverse the changes the future will bring

There is no way that technology can completely replace people. We will merely need to be flexible and willing to rethink, relearn, and retrain to keep pace. New jobs will open up, and as long as we are ready to do them, technology and human intelligence will always be symbiotic.