Preparing for the future of work

“Mom, when I grow up I want to be a guardian of the metaverse!”
The world is accelerating, jobs are changing and with them the dreams of our children.

Some scenarios predict that 80% of the professions of 2030 don't exist yet. Not only will our children’s dream jobs change, but ours too. However, new jobs mean new skills. Will we be ready with a HEC Lausanne degree obtained in 2010 (or worse, in the last century) to embrace the new careers offered by the gig-economy, the tele-migration and the extended reality?

Preparing for tomorrow was an easy task when our world was simple and moving on a linear and relatively slow trajectory. Education had a clear meaning and mission. 

Today our world is accelerating and we must adapt to a changing environment and prepare for an uncertain tomorrow.

Whether they are rapid or not, and whether they concern specific functions, professions or industries, these major changes in the work force are not an unforeseeable fate. They are rather the result of an evolution with more distant origins and which we can anticipate.

Obsolescence of skills can be prevented with anticipation

We can identify the emergence of technologies and their disruption potential in an environment or a value chain, assessing to what extent they will change today's professions. Anticipating these changes allows us to influence their use before it is dictated by larger forces. However, adapting our services, products and business models requires anticipation beyond a decade. Updating your smartphone's operating system may only take a few minutes, but updating your own operating system (i.e. your skills) will take many years. 

In education, the time lag between the identification of new skill demand and the graduation of the first students with those skills is so large that we can no longer be updating our system, we need to be changing it entirely for tomorrow.

We need to harness the potential of foresight and work towards human sustainability.

Foresight is about understanding future disruptions, lifting the veil of complexity, and determining what actions to consider today to maintain or create a competitive advantage. Human sustainability is about improving and adapting the relevance, value-added and well-being of all people as they continue to live in a constantly changing and increasingly disrupted environment.

And this is what we do at HEC Lausanne, at the Swiss Center for Positive Futures.

When it comes to tackling complexity, diversity becomes a crucial asset. Diversity is not only about gender and race, but also about generations. While the seniors - our Alumni - represent stability, loyalty and therefore security, the juniors - our recent graduates and current students - bring instability, agility and therefore resilience – both profile which  will be highly needed in times of turmoil.

We look forward to working with the HEC Lausanne Alumni. While we cannot predict the professions of tomorrow, we can shape them together.

On the same topic:
(in french)

23.09.21 / Conference - Imaginez au-delà! Le monde du travail évolue : repensez le rôle des RH à l’horizon 2030 / Isabelle Chappuis