3. Human cloud
Digital platforms, or ‘Human Clouds’, that match employers with freelancers, such as Upwork, or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, are growing fast and are changing the way independent workers are offering their services.
Reverse migration driven by Brexit and party politics could result in key skill shortages and may have to be sourced in different ways. Market volatility requires businesses to use greater flexibility in employment contracts, with zero hour contracts or temporary arrangements increasing.
The benefits for employers are obvious as tasks can be started instantly and will be completed cheaply without the need for any employment contracts. The benefits and consequences for workers are evolving. It is potentially increasing inequality and creating downward pressure on income.
However, it does provide the freedom to work on varied tasks, anywhere and anytime. In addition, a global demand on skills would feed into pricing changes too.
The financial services industry needs to consider how and what products can be offered to this growing market and will need to work collaboratively with the government in order to make sure that large and growing sections of the workforce are not excluded from access to saving products.
4. Continuous personal and professional development
Businesses and therefore the workforce will need to be able to keep up with the rate of change of technology and the skills required for the business. This will require employees to adopt a continuous learning approach to ensure their skills stay relevant and up to date.
Graduates are already struggling to get into the job market and if the shelf life of their acquired skills is shrinking, it will challenge individuals, education institutions, the government and businesses to approach a new way of continually developing skills.
From a business perspective online, peer to peer and ‘just in time’ training and development will become part and parcel of an employee’s life.
In order to stay competitive, educational institutions will need to offer greater recognition to new ways of learning and training, or risk the potential of future scholars finding other cheaper ways to educate themselves.
Anytime-anywhere qualifications and learning platforms will need to be accessible and be mixed with other methods, such as peer to peer learning.
5. Role and power of government
Strains on governments are diminishing their ability to make significant investments in areas such as education, infrastructure, health and social care.
Policies over the last decade have already started to shift a lot of responsibility to the individual, such as funding your degree and your pension.
