Today's Skills, Tomorrow’s Jobs: How Will Your Team Fare in the Future Work

Advanced technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is changing our workplaces. And, the current pandemic has greatly accelerated these technological upheavals in the workplace.

Is your organization, and the people in it, geared up for these emerging new paradigms? Are you future-ready?

Beware! There is one non-negotiable must-have in this process: firm-rootedness and readiness with digital skills. No individual, team, or organization can progress into the increasingly digital future without them.

Retaining relevance: The reskilling of individuals

In the past, when many required skills were non-specialized, redeploying people was easy. Now, the number of such routine jobs has rapidly shrunk. A redeployment is no longer an option.

Reskilling, teaching someone to do something new and different, must come to the fore. It requires understanding each individual, judging their abilities, and training them for suitable new roles.

The concept of leadership also has to evolve and have fluidity. Those with better human-centric skills will inevitably come to the fore.

Reimagining teams and rebuilding structures

While steering micro-level change at the individual level, an organization will also need to restructure itself to face tomorrow. Bear in mind that some of the lockdown-induced virtual work patterns are here to stay. Some boundaries have got blurred; others have encroached on adjoining territory.

The senior leadership has to build a versatile mid-level cadre. This cadre should efficiently multitask. They should respect the division of labor yet also cross frontiers with smooth flexibility if needed.

In the new hybrid workplaces, reimagining the traditional concepts of teams and leadership is essential. While some tasks are more easily done through virtual interaction, many will require direct interaction in an old-fashioned face-to-face mode.

Further, teams will be reshaped and reconfigured periodically based on the needs of a project. Leaders may not have fixed roles. Instead, leadership may be transferred from time to time to the person best suited for the current task on hand.