Do You Have The Right Skills?

Technology is continuing to change the workplace and highlight the need for companies and employees to be more flexible in what they do and how they do it. The tradition of training for a single career and working for a single company until retirement is over. In its place is a new model based on having the right skills, different jobs and a number of careers.

The make-up of the workplace is changing, not least because older people are working for longer, technology is changing everything and the number and influence of women continues to increase and create workplace change.

For those, however, with the right skills there are many opportunities, rich rewards and a better work-life balance given their value to employers.

For those with no skills or the wrong skills there are fewer opportunities, as a lack of demand, short-term contracts, low pay and insecurity of employment dominate the work place.

Businesses continue to reduce their core full-time staff and use external contractors, agency workers and freelance agents in flexible ways to manage periods of extra demand.

Technology, robots and the introduction of artificial intelligence is making mid-level jobs obsolete and, therefore, companies will become more efficient and profitable and, ironically, less dependent on people.

Businesses will have to be more resilient to changes in the environment and develop the flexibility to move jobs between locations, as markets become more global and interconnected.

Given the detail of the recent UK budget it is apparent that government will continue to restrict spending, even as the economy recovers and businesses grow again.

Demand from emerging countries around the world will continue to increase, as hundreds of millions of people experience and enjoy the consumer society for the first time.

But such demand will force businesses to put greater emphasis on creativity and innovation and compete for people with the skills they need, as a way to stay relevant to customers.

As a result, the workplace as we know it is changing dramatically and increasingly rewards companies with the right people and people with the right skills.

Even though there are few certainties in life it is becoming more evident that the world of work is changing and will, in the years ahead, change beyond recognition.

SO, if you have the right skills you are ready for the new world; if not, there is still time but the clock is ticking.

What do you think?

Do you have the right skills?

Look forward to your comments.