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The Future of Work

There are many writings and theories about work and the future of work.  This is a topic of conversation in many circles because technology has become smarter and faster leading to the automation of things that have not been automated before. Some of these thinkers believe that there will be a workless future for humans as robots will do everything.
 
As much as many of these theories sound like a science fiction story, they are important conversation for those of us in the workforce development business. We are all about people and how they work. Thinking about human evolution and the development of societies and culture, one imagines that our more primitive ancestors learned new tasks by “accidentally” trying to do something and discovering if the task was productive or not. These experiments were work.
 
I always believe that people will work. The jobs that people do will change, but people will work. One reason is that people have evolved to do something. We are not bred to sit in one spot for our entire lives. People will always work. With this thought, I do believe that there will always be paid work and unpaid work.
 
Unpaid work is not just volunteering for charitable causes. Unpaid work is the personal work humans do for themselves or their family. Sometimes it is may be a task that can be automated, like vacuuming your home, but other times, having a robot do it seems horrible. Imagine a baby crying and a mother ignores they cry, only to send a robot over to pick up the crying baby.  
 
Paid work will also always have a human component. It may be possible for an ill person to be given medical testing and medicine by robots, but yet there is something holding back this level of automation. As much as technology and the robots of the industry exist, care of people is by people.
 
My theory is that people will always take care of people. As people, we may incorporate robots to take care of people, but we will always take care of each other.  Recently, I saw a commercial for a service that will provide therapists that will text message you each week. On the other end of the cell phone is a person.   
How this influences my work as a workforce development professional is that it forces me to think of work and how people work more creatively. This is true for the actual processes and procedure in workforce development for the professionals in the field and how we service our customers. How do we automate services to job seeking and business customers without losing the human touch? How do job seekers transform themselves and determine their place in the always advancing automated society? How to businesses grow and develop automation and where do people fit in?
 
All big questions for debate, but certainly important thoughts as we move to the future of work.
~Karen Cirincione
Email: kcirincione@gmail.com        
Linked In: www.linkedin.com/in/karenjcirincione
Twitter:@kcirincione

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