Anyone running a company knows that the professional environment doesn’t stay still for very long. The nature of work is always changing, and both management and employees have to make sure they are “Future-Proof” in order to stay relevant and competitive. At Kazi, we care deeply about helping employees and employers manage transitions effectively, and the preparations for the future of work are no exception. Let’s take a look at some of the things that are coming our way!

Working with your Employees to Help them Develop the Skills of the Future

The old model of the 20th century was that a student would go to school for a bunch of years, and then enter the labor force already knowing what they need to know to be a successful employee and thrive together with their employer. That model is dead.

Just like Nikolaas recently explained in the Techmag show, the world of technical and soft skills is changing every few months now. And the skills you learn in your freshman year of college can easily be obsolete by the time you graduate. As employers and employees, it’s going to be necessary to work on constantly up-skilling, even after you are working with each other. Employers that rise to this challenge and provide the resources and encouragement for their employees will find that they not only cultivate more capable employees, but more loyal and satisfied ones, too! We’ve all got to keep learning!

Build Creativity into more tasks

We’ve all been hearing for years about the importance of “soft skills,” and the value of thinking in different ways. As stated by HRdive.com, these approaches can bring out solutions you might not have even known you were looking for.

These are often the best kind of solutions Well, the best way to ensure that these kinds of skills and ideas rise to the surface is to build in the need for creativity into more of what you do as a company. When employees are thinking with the creative side of their brains, they engage different modalities, and see new opportunities and solutions. As you may already know, our unique expectations scan helps identify employees that are preternaturally-inclined to work better in creative environments and think in unconventional ways.

The centrality of adaptability

For decades, the watchword of Human Resources and employee identification was “Talent,” so much so that in a lot of industries the two words are still used interchangeably! But now there’s a new word in town. Don’t get us wrong, talent still matters, and you don’t want to go hiring people who aren’t capable. But think of it more like, there’s now something you need to think about at least as much as talent, and that’s adaptability. According to The Telegraph, it’s key to success in the HR industry.

With both the external and internal environments central to work changing so much and so fast, the capacity to adapt, change, and grow seamlessly and without stress and confusion is going to become more important. What’s problematic is that most university educations don’t provide any good indicators as to how adaptable someone is – the educational environment is still very controlled. That’s why at Kazi, we work on how to identify other kinds of proxies to point out where and how you can find employees who are adaptable and resilient, and ready for the challenges of the 21st century workplace.

The Rise of Working with the Machines

The Robots are coming … to work with you. By this point, it’s pretty clear that the 21st century is going to be the century of the robots. But a lot of the hype around them is needlessly overblown. Relatively few jobs are going to be literally cut out of the workforce as a result of adding automation and robots. What’s going to be much more common is the rise of jobs that people are going to have to do alongside robots. This will be the killer skill of the next decade, for employers and employees alike. Some people are going to be able to bring to bear a whole new array of skills and approaches to getting the most out of working with Artificial Intelligence programs and robots, and they will make the difference between the winners and the also-rans of the next few years. This is an emerging field, and there’s still a lot we don’t know, so this is one where you need to allow for more creativity and adaptability to help identify the best players before anyone else does.

At times of great change, and speedy change, the name of the game is flexibility. Can you learn, change, adapt and revise, on-the-fly, and repeatedly? Are you able to create new ideas out of whole cloth and move from ideation to implementation in a span of days instead of months? With the right team in place, you can! At Kazi, it’s our objective to help align your mission with the employee’s job, and to make sure everyone has the best skills for the task at hand. If you’re ready to have a conversation about making the next step into this exciting and ever-changing field, drop us a line today and we’d be happy to chat!