The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here. Lynda Gratton

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      7. Continued bubbles and crashes: booms and busts have been features of economic life for centuries, and we can expect them to continue to rock the world in the coming decades. This is combined with a need for the populations of many developed countries to rein in their spending, and to substantially increase their savings.

      8. The regional underclass emerge: we can expect that in an increasingly connected and globalising world the underclass, while still located in specific regions (such as sub-Saharan Africa), will also extend across the developed and developing worlds. This global underclass will be marked by their inability either to join the global market for skills or to have the skills and aspirations to become one of the army of service people who care for the needs of the growing ageing urban populations.

      From the 1950s onwards globalisation has been one of the driving forces in the shaping of how we work. As we can see from these pieces, this is only likely to increase, bringing with it both positive aspects in terms of an ever-increasingly global marketplace for talent and work, and also a darker aspect of continuously growing competition and fragmentation.

      The force of demography and longevity

      This, above all other forces, was the topic that most fascinated the members of the research consortium. We quickly understood that technology is changing everything and will continue to do so, and that natural resources are depleted and carbon footprints must be reduced. However, it was demography and longevity that really captured the attention of many of those in the Future of Work Consortium. I guess the simple reason is that the force of demography and longevity, more than any other forces, is intimately about us, our friends and our children. It’s about who is having babies, and how long these babies are going to live. It’s about how many people are working, and for how long. It’s about the four generations and how they are going to love and possibly hate each other. Demography and work are intertwined – and understanding the hard facts of demography is crucial to crafting a reasoned view of the future of work. There are three key aspects of demography that will influence work in the coming years – generational cohorts, birth rates and longevity.

      Generational cohorts are people born at roughly the same time, who as a consequence tend to have rather similar attitudes and expectations. They are often brought up with the same child-rearing practices and have similar experiences as teenagers and young adults. This is a particularly sensitive period for acquiring a moral and political orientation. These shared experiences produce what has been termed ‘generational markers’. These are important since they provide clues about how these generations will behave as they move into positions of decision-making at work and have increasing access to resources.

      By 2010 there were four distinct generations in the workforce – the Traditionalists (born around 1928 to 1945), the Baby Boomers (born around 1945 to 1964); the Generation X (born around 1965 to 1979) and Gen Y (born around 1980 to 1995). Coming up are Gen Z (born after 1995). The Traditionalists had their main impact on organisational life between 1960 and 1980. By 2010 they were already over 65, making up between 5% and 10% of the workforce. Between 2010 and 2025 the majority of this generation will have left the workforce. However, we can expect some part of their legacy to live on in organisational life since this generation were the initial architects of many organisational practices and processes which subsequently survived for decades.

      In many ways, the coming decades will be defined by the actions of the largest demographic group the world has ever seen – the Baby Boomers. This period saw around 77 million babies born in the USA, while the birth rates of many European countries reached as high as 20 per thousand, nearly five times the rate in 2010. In 2010 they were in their 50s and 60s and by 2025 most will have left the workforce, taking with them a huge store of tactical knowledge and knowhow; and also, if some commentators are to be believed, much of the wealth of the next generations. More importantly, as this huge bulge leaves the workforce, the post-1960s reduction in birth rates across the developed and much of the developing world will see significantly fewer people taking their place. This has huge implications for the retention of knowledge in companies and the challenge of severe skill shortages.

      The following generation – Generation X – is the generation that in 2010 are in their mid-40s and will be in their mid-60s by 2025 – so in 2010 they were entering the height of their earning power, beginning to see their children growing up. This is a generation that grew up in a time of economic uncertainty, the Vietnam War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1973 oil crisis, the dotcom bubble, the Iran hostage crisis, all of which reduced their expectation of a long-term relationship between employee and employer.⁶ They also increasingly witnessed their parents divorcing. In 1950, 26% of US marriages ended in divorce; by 1980 this had climbed to 48%.⁷ They were there when computers came into the home, when video games began to be played and the nascent internet began to connect them.⁸ While the Baby Boomers believed the world to be a place of future positive growth, this was not the case for Gen X. In real terms, Gen X US men in 2004 made 12% less than their fathers at the same age in 1974.⁹ This was on top of significant personal investments in education, joining a workforce behind a generation of Baby Boomers, and competing in a weak global economy.

      By 2025 the Gen Y’ers (born around 1980 to 1995) will be aged between 30 and 45 and at a crucial stage of their working lives. This was the first generation to have grown up alongside the bulky embryonic forms of personal computers, the internet, social media and digital technologies. Many Gen Y’ers closely followed the rapid technological evolution of their time and now have an intimate knowledge of, and perhaps even admiration for, the devices and platforms they use. Their social habits and behaviours shifted as they increasingly used text, email, Face-book and Twitter to communicate. They talked to their friends online, and played with strangers in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Second Life.

      Gen Z by 2005 had reached their first decade, and by 2025 will be around 35. From 2020 onwards they will be taking an increasing role in the business life of companies across the world. Called by some the Re-Generations and by others the Internet Generation, this group is often defined by their connectivity.¹⁰ Although we cannot be sure how they will develop as a generational cohort, we know something of their early experiences. Generation Z will be the first generation to grow up surrounded by the trends we have discussed, and the challenges and opportunities that we have talked about will weigh heavily on their minds, helping to form who they are and what they do.

      At the same time, with regard to birth rates, there are complex demographic patterns emerging across the world. The developed world is ageing fast and hardly reproducing itself. That’s why by 2050 one in three people across the developed world will be drawing a pension. This has huge implications in many respects, particularly where a country decides to spend its money. In the USA, for example, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that spending on entitlements will grow from 10% of GDP in 2010 to 16% in 2035.

      The soon-to-be-retiring Baby Boomers are primarily a phenomena of post-World War birth rates. Since that time, birth rates in much of the developed world have been in decline, caused by a combination of increasing female education, personal choice and enhanced child medical provision. In China the ‘one child per family’ government regulation introduced in 1979 has drastically curtailed the growth of the population, from an average of 5.8 children per family to 1.7. However, lowering birth rates is not a worldwide phenomenon, and we can expect to see birth rates remaining high in many of the developing regions of the world such as sub-Saharan Africa and rural India. Clearly difference in birth rates will impact on the availability of labour and skills and also on the labour migration routes we can expect to see forming over the coming decades.

      In Europe the working population is rapidly ageing СКАЧАТЬ