A timely post from Mercer about how we should actively manage our careers, by taking the Future of Work into our own hands... Given how this resonates with Protagion’s principles, we’re bringing it to our readers’ and members’ attention too through a summary below and a link to the full article.

The original post was written by Christina Dove, Partner at Mercer. Christina is based in the United Kingdom, and is Continuous Improvement Leader for Europe & Global Delivery. She’s worked at Mercer for 30+ years, having joined Mercer as an actuarial student in 1988. In her current role, she is responsible for creating a lean business culture within Mercer globally, delivering global transformation projects. Her team of 25 crosses the United States, Portugal, Poland, the United Kingdom and India.

Referencing Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2018 report, Christina’s article asserts that, as the future is here, the onus is on us – individuals and employers – to determine our own roles in it.

​She sets out five suggestions on how we can take the future of work into our own hands:

​Cognizant’s Centre for the Future of Work has written two reports about jobs they anticipate will emerge over the next decade. To do so, they studied the major macroeconomic, political, demographic, societal, cultural, business and technology trends. These trends include: growing populations, aging populations, populism, environmentalism, migration, automation, arbitrage, quantum physics, AI, biotechnology, space exploration, cybersecurity, and virtual reality. 

They feel that these jobs (and others) will begin to replace work that is being automated away. Some are already observable in the marketplace, but will expand further over time.

Two videos (roughly 4 and 6 minutes long respectively) which give examples of the new jobs Cognizant see:

I also particularly enjoyed the chapter on “Humanness, Confidence, and Creative Competence”, and that is the basis for this article, especially as it echoes aspects Protagion has covered in previous posts:

• Encouraging change, including how a leader’s role is to support people through change, especially as different people in an organisation have different levels of desire for change
• Thriving as a contractor / gig economy worker by managing the human anxieties of contracting, using “liberating connections” as support to “endure the emotional ups and downs of [independent] work and gain energy and inspiration from the freedom [contracting offers]”

At Protagion, we’ve also been thinking about the trend towards automation and its longer term impacts on the nature of work. Many commentators argue that the best response for us is to sharpen and emphasise our skills which are uniquely human, including empathy, compassion, creativity, strategic thinking, communication, and collaboration / teamwork. Doing this, they argue, will enable us to outsource the routine, process-driven, optimisation-focused work to robots, giving us more time to focus on where we as humans can add most value.