Orient Magazine Special Orient Supplement: Future of Work | Page 21
Orient - The Official Magazine of the British Chamber of Commerce Singapore - Issue 71 April 2019
Upskilling
It’s been widely recognised that the 4th industrial revolution will be accompanied by mass re-skilling of the workforce, unlike anything we have seen before.
The pace of both job displacement and creation is accelerating, and traditional policies and practices such as redundancy, severance and outplacement related to displacement as well as recruitment, on-boarding and induction related to job fulfilment will slow industries down from swiftly anticipating on changing market circumstances.
PwC’s 22nd CEO survey revealed that a multitude of factors including the shortage of skilled talent are behind global business leaders’ pessimism in growth prospects this year. Upskilling employees is a solution that allows efficient and quick redeployment, and will significantly impact employee morale and employee loyalty.
For instance, successful pilots in Luxemburg have proven to be effective and initial data indicates that end-to-end upskilling is only a fourth of the total cost of making an employee redundant to look for new employment - taking into consideration social welfare, unemployment benefits and loss of income tax.
Leadership
The role of leaders is becoming increasingly complex. Take upskilling for example; the complex nature of dealing with the displacement of existing jobs and the creation and fulfilment of new jobs has a big impact on running business as usual.
Leaders need to be able to navigate through this complexity and lead their teams through large scale transformations. This is not something that one picks up overnight; leaders need to have the ability to deal with ambiguity, establish deeper emotional commitment and have astounding resilience.
What Singapore needs to deal with the complex workforce challenges though are ‘strategist leaders’; leaders that are able to lead complex transformations. Strategist leaders bring different capabilities to the table as opposed to individual contributors and subject matter experts. For instance, the ability to reframe complex problems in order to find multi-disciplinary solutions, the ability to quickly shift between articulating strategy and supporting execution.
We are pleased to see various parties in the ecosystem coming together to deal with the challenges of our future workforce. For instance, the education industry is working closely with industry associations and professional services firms to design, develop and roll out the ‘Industry 4.0’ programmes, focused on supporting leaders of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).
Such initiatives are timely as developing leadership capabilities - in particular developing the so-called strategist leader capabilities - are comprehensive ‘journeys’ that leaders have to immerse themselves in.
Growth mindset
Core to both the upskilling challenge as well as the development of strategist leaders is the awareness and understanding of individuals that learning is not a one-off exercise, but a dynamic process that requires opening up to new and different experiences.
A ‘growth mindset’ must be inculcated in individuals to accept that failure is not something shameful; it provides opportunities to learn and grow and develop new skills and capabilities - which is exactly what is required to confidently upskill oneself or develop the ability to deal with ambiguity.
Against the forecast of 21% of Singaporean full-time workers’ jobs being displaced by 2028, we need to address this now in order to be ready for the future.
About the Author Martijn SCHOUTEN is the Singapore People & Organisation Leader at PwC South East Asian Consulting. His expertise is in various aspects of transformational and organisational change, such as operational change management, cultural and behavioural change, communication, training & development and organisation (re)design.
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