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New Normal Part 2 | CONTENT
2
Introduction 4
Mindshift One 5
A job is a very unreliable way to define our identity and our talents
Mindshift Two 7
Full-time, office-based work with one employer will no longer be
the norm
Mindshift Three 8
We need to find our own inner genius
Mindshift Four 10
Qualifications may not make all your capabilities and future
potential visible to an employer
Mindshift Five 13
Don’t just find work, find a career and a growing job neighbourhood
CONCLUSION 17
A 180-day action plan to future-proof your career
Working Futures™ 19
Want to get in touch 19
© The Institute for Working Futures pty. ltd.
acn: 22 054 466 769
CONTENT
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift Thre e
3
New
Normal Part 2 | Introduction
The world of work has always
been evolving. COVID
-19 has
just brought a giant dose of
reality to discussions about
what this means for workers,
employers, governments and
society in general.
Simon Hann,
C
hartered Accountants ANZ Group Executive Education
and Learning
“
“
New Normal Part 2 | Introduction
4
In a mere 90 days, COVID-19 turbo-
charged trends we knew were
coming and forced us to work in
ways we did not expect until 2025.
This new work mode is not an
experiment; it is an abiding reality.
It is a tough challenge we must all
face no matter how keen some of
us might be to return to a pre-
pandemic work culture.
This article suggests how to
prepare over the next 180 days for
the profound changes in work,
skills, and careers heading our way.
The post-lockdown labour market
will be so transformed that
students, workers, and
organisations must plan vigorously
for the new normal—rather like
CEOs who create a 100-day plan
when they take over a company.
To plan effectively, we must adjust
our thinking in five fundamental
ways:
Mindshift One:
A job is a very unreliable way to
define our identity and our talents
Mindshift Two:
Full-time, office-based work with
one employer will no longer be the
norm
Mindshift Three:
We need to find our own inner
genius
Mindshift Four:
Qualifications may not make all
your capabilities and future
potential visible to an employer
Mindshift Five:
Don’t just find work, find a career
and a growing job neighbourhood
INTRODUCTION
“
The future belongs to those who believe in the
beauty of their dreams
.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
THE ECONOMIC AND
EMPLOYMENT AFTERSHOCK OF
COVID-19 WILL CONTINUE
Projections over the next 180
days from June 2020 suggest
the post-lockdown labour
market will be so transformed
that every organisation, student
and worker—employed or
unemployed—should adapt
their thinking and plan for the
new normal.
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift One
5
Without realising it, employers and
workers have responded to the
shared experience of COVID-19 by
engaging in a reinvented sense of
work and how we do it.
Importantly, the idea that our jobs
fix and define who we are is now
obsolete. We need to break free
from this outmoded belief that a
person’s traditional job title—often
a relic of the industrial age—is a
measure of their worth and
character.
Humans are social animals. As
such, we tend to define ourselves
by what we do. Whether we want
to or not, we judge a person within
60 seconds of meeting them for the
first time. Think about how people
introduce themselves. Typically,
they state their name and
occupation. We then apply social
norms and personal stereotypes to
judge that person. For instance,
why do we intuitively raise the
community value of a health
professional but lower the
community value of a council
garbage collector? Why do we
mentally rank the farm worker as
lower in community value than the
software developer? Is it about the
qualification level or the income?
How could vocationally qualified
tradies and miners who dominate
Australia’s top 10 ‘richest’
postcodes by median annual
income not enjoy a significant
social status?
So if we continue to confer greater
social status upon degree-holding,
high-earning professionals, how
will society determine the status of
those who fill significant new roles
that span job families with no
income or qualification
precedents? For instance, the
knowledge architect, cybersecurity
analyst, customer advocate,
hydrologist, drone operator, or
home care therapist.
We need to move beyond our habit
of determining inherent worth
through archaic job titles tied to
income and qualifications. Instead,
we need to uncover and nurture a
person’s innate talents and
strengths and use them to
determine worth and value.
MINDSHIFT ONE
A job is
a very unreliable way to define our identity and our talents
Image: © Can Stock Photo / felker
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift One
6
Image: © Ca
n Stock Photo 72368770/ nblxer
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift Tw o
7
During the pandemic, Australia and
New Zealand participated in what
some call “the great work-from-
home experiment”. I would counter
that it is only an experiment in that
it confirmed how rapidly we could
shift from traditional workplaces to
working from home. The real
experiment is this: how quickly can
we absorb displaced workers in a
transformed labour market?
Employer intentions are clear; none
of those surveyed, nor any of the
current employment data collected,
indicate that the new normal will
include the same mix and mode of
work. The shift is to a more gig-like
economy featuring part-time,
project-based, and collaborative
remote work. Gig workers abandon
traditional employment to work
independently and sell their skills
to multiple employers anywhere in
the world, task-by-task or project-
to-project. Growth of the gig
economy is one of the many trends
that delineate the inexorable
movement away from a 9-to-5 job
at a single employer’s workplace. In
April 2019, some 4.7 million
workers (38 percent) of the
Australian workforce were
freelance or contract workers with
more than one employer. At the
same time in the United States, 57
million workers undertook
freelance work and generated over
US$1 trillion.1 Freelance numbers
in the US have risen by an average
of one million for each of the
previous five years.
Since the pandemic lockdown,
many full-time employees have had
to work like small business
contractors, consultants, project
workers, and freelancers. Global
surveys reveal many do not want to
return to their pre-COVID-19
commute and a number of
organisations are already surveying
employees to confirm how many
want to continue working
remotely.2 Remote working
improves flexibility and lowers
costs for many large employers
because it builds global pools of
pre-qualified contractors and grafts
on the talent as required. Other
organisations will use COVID-19 as
a reason to restructure and cut
costs. Organisations and workers
across the globe will use digital
platforms for hire and labour
exchange.
While trends towards working
independently existed prior to the
pandemic, the biggest change is
the qualified success of working
from home as a social experiment.
Australia has sustained an
estimated 60 to 70 percent of the
workforce working from home for
over 90 days.3 Undoubtedly,
technology, digital platforms, and
infrastructure do support remote
work. We have also demolished
barriers—such as technology
adoption skills, loneliness, cost, and
family distractions—that propped
up the idea that remote work is
less productive than office-based
work. While problems do exist,
people have overcome enormous
challenges. Research shows
productivity remains high and work
processes are adapting rapidly with
collaborative platforms that
facilitate altered working
conditions.
The most critical finding about
remote work and new modes of
employer engagement is the need
to appreciate each person’s unique
capabilities. For example, are they
able to interact with other people?
Are they able to use automated
customer service or logistics
processes? More importantly, if
short-term contractors can they ‘fit’
into the team and conform to the
employer’s culture, values, and risk
profile?
MINDSHIFT
TWO
Full
-time, office-
based work with one employer will no longer be the norm
“The future is already here—
it’s just not evenly
distributed.”
William Gibson1
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift Thre e
8
Albert Einstein’s axiom highlights
how blind we can be to our own
genius; that is, to our unique gifts
and strengths. It also highlights
how hard it is to apply this insight
in a COVID-19 world where jobs will
be harder to get and keep. We will
grow increasingly anxious if our
qualifications and personal
attributes fail to meet the explicit
needs and requirements for jobs.
We can alleviate this anxiety when
we acknowledge each person’s
inner genius.
My own situation provides insight
here. When I was 15, my father
thought my job prospects were so
poor he took me to do a battery of
intelligence tests. My results
revealed an active, analytical brain
with very highly developed design,
creativity, and spatial reasoning
abilities, along with a strong
preference for hands-on work. On
the other hand, I was a dud when it
came to the abilities needed to get
a “good” job, scoring mostly in the
lower 10th percentile for science,
maths, or numerical reasoning. The
report gave my father hope,
however, and with the psychologist
agreed I had all the attributes of a
landscape designer.
This experience and resulting
insights taught me my first
important lesson:
I had to build my
own niche because
jobs where I
could be a genius were yet to be
invented
. After a stint in the army
(outdoors, hands-on), I progressed
my university studies and finished
a PhD in a field of public
administration that later became
known as organisational design
and human capital.
The second lesson came from my
wife:
we all think differently
.
Echoing earlier sanctions from
schoolteachers to stop
“daydreaming”, my wife (an artist
and teacher) found it disconcerting
that when I was ‘working’ at home I
had my feet on the table, office
chair fully reclined, and was looking
out the window. The light came on
for her at an art opening as she
expounded the featured artist’s use
of negative space. After explaining
that negative space is the space
around and between the main
images, she acknowledged that the
brain and its optic nerve wiring are
unique to each person. Amazed, I
disappeared into a deep
neurological exploration until my
wife jolted me back to reality (she
thought five minutes staring into
the top of the picture frame was a
tad weird). We both learnt
something that day: she sees the
world in shades and relationships; I
need to freewheel—to think
without thinking. We all process
thought differently and attempts to
standardise thinking are doomed
to fail.
Recent explorations in
neuroscience and neuroplasticity
reveal that standardised thinking
discourages experiences that
develop and re-organise neural
connections in the brain. When
standardised thinking lords it over
creative thinking, the mix of minds
available to create new and
competitive products is about as
deep as a birdbath.
In the mid-to-late 1800s, schools
emulated factories to produce
people who could fill routine jobs
that needed little creativity. These
days, personalisation,
responsiveness, and customer
experience prevail, and as a society
we place greater value on
innovation, creativity, and
collaborative thinking.
MINDSHIFT
THREE
We need to find our own inner genius
4
“Everybody is a genius. But if you
judge a fish by its ability to climb
a tree, it will live its whole life
believing that it is stupid. ”
Albert Einstein
Image: Can Stock Photo 29142149
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift Thre e
9
Yet our education system is rusted
onto principles closer to the first
industrial age and neglects to
assess and report on our character,
personal preferences, and
attributes. While some companies
test for psychometrics at pre-hire,
most fail to test for our inner
genius. This behoves us to find
valid, third party assessments
ourselves that uncover our unique
talents and then make them visible
to employers.
Figure 1:
Capabilities innate to humans vastly improves future employability and career prospects
Source:
Deloitte (June 2019).
The path to prosperity: Why the future of work is human,
Deloitte Insight, page ii.
“There is no fixed agenda for
21st century skills – it depends
on who you are, where you
work, what you want to do, and
where you want to go.”
(Dr Andrea North-Samardzic,
Course Director, MBA, Deakin
University)
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift Fo ur
10
There is a mismatch between what
a graduate’s degree says they can
do and what many employers value
when they hire. This mismatch
grows as technology disrupts jobs
and universities adhere to tight
discipline-based boundaries that
no longer reflect business structure
and work organisation. With a total
outstanding national HECs-HELP
student debt of over $62 billion,
neoliberals—along with most
everyone else—will demand that
taxpayer funds ensure universities
provide qualifications that get
graduates jobs in a post-pandemic
world.
Research confirms that a focus on
technical knowledge at the expense
of developing a student’s innate
human capabilities lessens their
chance of employment. 5 This
occurred in tightly defined subjects
such as business, accounting, and
law because job classifications and
job families (the disciplines) were
changing so rapidly that in the
glacial time it took to update
curriculum, students were
graduating with qualifications that
failed to make them job-ready or
flexible enough to fill jobs that
ignored obsolete job
classifications.6
We know that our jobs are not a
measure of our inherent human
worth and that automation and
changes to how we work are
increasing, not reducing, a person’s
innate value. For instance,
organisational workforce plans that
account for human capital have
shifted from the number of people
holding skills, knowledge and job
performance competence, to a
person’s capability and their
potential to underpin an
organisation’s ability to deliver its
core strategic purpose. Thus, future
potential is as valuable to the
bottom line as past productivity.
The pandemic demands we look
beyond tangible job competencies
to intangible qualities such as the
ability to adapt, learn, fit into
company culture, and work
collaboratively. The traditional
focus on people as mere job fillers
must go. Artificial barriers that limit
a person’s full capabilities must
also go. Equally, recruiting
graduates with churned-out
bachelor degrees that eschew their
cognitive or personal attributes will
fail to promote either inclusivity or
employability. Employers are
already broadening their
recruitment aperture. They now
look beyond resumes and degrees
and seek people with social and
emotional intelligence—wherever
they reside, whatever their
ethnicity or backgrounds—who can
build an adaptable, innovative,
globally responsive, and customer-
focused workforce.
MINDSHIFT
FOUR
Qualifications may not make all your capabilities and future potential
visible to an employer
Image: © Austock 000088231
“To open the talent supply
pipeline we [employers] have to
become better at identifying
and reskilling existing staff with
underutilised or under-
appreciated capability.”
(Stephen Chey, IBM Security)
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift Fo ur
11
New credentialism:
Digital and micro-credentials7
In an effort to attract more
students, most universities have
tried to use micro-credentials to
recognise completion of
disaggregated parts of an existing
qualification. These are taken to
market in short courses,
professional or executive
programs, or to complement
massive online and open course
(MOOC) offerings. But tertiary
education institutions8 as a whole
are slow to recognise the full
import of micro-credentials. This is
in stark contrast to many large
companies and professional
bodies.
In Australia and New Zealand,
organisations used the COVID-19
hiatus to accelerate their focus on
one of their major strategic issues:
workforce restructuring and skills
development. Augmenting these
efforts is the decade-long industry
investment in corporate training
and professional development; an
investment that has seen revenues
in corporate and professional
education segments far outstrip
growth in vocational and higher
education sectors. This market
growth is expected to continue
post-pandemic and expand to
include clawing back control of
online assessment, credentials and
professional certification from
lethargic public educational
providers.9
By the end of 2020, efforts to
develop future workforce
capabilities that will be validated
with digital or micro-credentials
authorised by respected third
parties (e.g., universities,
admissions bodies, or global
professional alliances), will cover
nearly a million Australian
employees and professionals. All
will focus on technical skills and
highly sought after soft-skills
related to human capability that
enhance the ability to learn,
collaborate and adapt quickly to
newly created roles (See Figure 2).
This includes programs being
accelerated by companies (e.g.,
Westpac, Bupa, IBM, BHP Billiton),
professional bodies (Chartered
Accountants Australia and New
Zealand, Engineers Australia,
Property Council Academy,
Australian Computer Society), and
governments (e.g., Victorian
Government’s Working for Victoria
program). While most of these
initiatives include relationships with
a university to provide pathways
into qualifications (for instance
Deakin University, Griffith
University, and RMIT), none are
reliant on accreditation of the
credential, content, delivery, or
subjects extracted from standard
degree offerings.
Figure
2: Having soft skill related capabilities vastly improves future employability and careers
Source: Deloitte (2017).
Soft skills for business success
, DeakinCo. & Deloitte Access Economics, page 7.
“Digital credentials are the
trading
currency of the global labour
market. They underpin efforts by
employers and educators to
evolve
– to create a learning culture, to
reskill workforces, and to ensure
graduates are future ready.”
(David Kinsella, Founder, Everitas)
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift Fiv e
13
The pandemic’s most profoundly
unsettling fallout is the social and
economic cost of unemployment or
under-employment. While the end
of lockdown will improve
employment prospects in some
sectors, others will shrink
permanently.
The lockdown allowed companies
to rollout rapid workforce
restructures originally slated for a
more leisurely three-to-five-year
deployment. The more prepared
companies knew that to remain
competitive they had to deal with
macroeconomic forces such as
globalisation, changing
demographics, and technology
disruption. In a fast-paced
competitive environment, the
pandemic allowed executives to hit
pause and roll forward systems-
wide structural transformation.
Yes, the future arrived early but its
brutal effect on employment will, in
the short term, outstrip the positive
effects of automation and business
restructuring that will eventually
create new jobs.
So how can we plan a sustainable
career and find jobs in this
turbulent post-COVID-19 world?
As with the projected future
workforce employment shifts,
COVID-19 confirms employability
resides not in skilling for a job role,
but a career. It is about skills that
go beyond the vertical movement
within an occupational stream. As
automation disrupts our sense of a
vocation and the associated career
pathways, capabilities will more
decide employability—capabilities
that enable an individual to move
horizontally and to transfer their
skills into new or converged jobs
where technology augments
existing human tasks.
Where a set of common
capabilities held by one job is
shared or substantially underpins
other jobs, these jobs form a
capability cluster
or
job
neighbourhood
.11 Instead of
focussing on tying skills
development to jobs, the aim is to
develop workforce capacity by
ensuring we assess and nurture
people with capabilities that
promote movement into and
between as many job roles as
possible in a cluster (See Figure 3
for system-wide workforce
clusters), while ensuring they can
fill predicted new work roles. This
means we can systematically
foresee and develop capabilities
people will need before the new
job role is created.
MINDSHIFT
FIVE
Don’t just find work, find a
career and a growing job neighbourhood
Image: © Can Stoc k Photo 7612940
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift Fiv e
14
Image: © Can Stock Photo 53298189
Figure
3: Capability clusters that form macro-level job neighbourhoods
Source: © Working
Futures™, 2017.
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift Fiv e
15
Capabilities are the currency we
use to create a profile for our
workforce and to determine
requirements for roles at different
levels of work.
Job Neighbourhoods tangibly link a
worker’s capabilities to their
potential range of current and
predicted work roles. Most
importantly, capabilities provide an
enduring currency irrespective of
how a job role is described or if it
lacks a standard occupational
classification in a government
system.
A workforce plan must ensure we
have the capabilities to perform
current work roles and that we are
ready to reallocate people and
their capabilities in response to
work changes. To future-proof their
career, it is of critical importance
that individuals have all their
technical and future capabilities
recorded and that they seek a job
where these capabilities fall into a
large and growing job
neighbourhood.
As an example, the World
Economic Forum suggested
automation and robotic
technologies would see
professional accountants and
auditors, and the associated
clerical roles, lose over 40 percent
of the current employment
numbers by 2025, effectively
making global occupation
redundant by 2028.12 However, an
analysis of the future accountant
and their capabilities confirm they
have enhanced employment
opportunities once we remove the
‘job’ lenses and focus instead on
job neighbourhoods. In the
regional example provided above,
the
Finance Manager
looks to be a
good job given current
employment levels. But the
indicative 10-year employment
growth projections are poor. By
comparison, the employment for
Cost Accountants
is comparatively
lower today, and the
Systems
Accountant
is much lower. But the
latter job has much better long-
term growth projections.
Nevertheless, the capabilities form
a cluster that encompass all these
and more job roles (i.e., form a job
neighbourhood). A capabilities
approach already shows some
employers that what they thought
was a skill shortage when seeking
Systems Accountants was actually
more rapidly and affordably
addressed by grafting one or two
new capabilities onto existing
accounting professionals and
moving them into this role.
“When you’re unemployed
choosing the job you want is
*@!%* difficult. Sorry, but I
survive by keeping my eyes on
where I want to be, not where I
am.”
Participant, Digital Economy and Regional
Futures, Focus Group, N.W. Tasmania
Figure 4: Accounting job neighbourhood snapshot (Region X)
Source: Bowles, M. & Thomas, L. (2019).
Future accountant
, Chartered Accountants ANZ, Sydney.
New Normal Part 2 | Mindshift Fiv e
16
Where are the employment
opportunities and future-proof
careers?
Is it possible to predict
employment opportunities now
and in the six months after the
pandemic?
Using Australian and global data,
let’s examine the job status of the
top five economic sectors during
the first three months of lockdown
and the likely job opportunities
over the 180 days to the end of
2020.13
Employment: Effect of Lockdown
Employment –
Hardest hit
Employment -
Growth
Restaurants and food
services (Hospitality)
Accommodation
Tourism
Air transport
Theatres and
entertainment venues
Food
and beverage
Grocery
Nursing and
residential care
Education (Primary
and Secondary)
Logistics
Over the next 180 days, it is
possible to anticipate the effect on
employment for sectors other than
those listed above:
Employment Outlook (180 Days)
Most likely to
decline
Most likely to
steadily grow
Higher education
Arts, sports, and
museums
Public administration
and clerical support
Real E
state sales
Automotive dealers
Broadcasting and
telecommunications
Courier and postal
services
Social welfare and
counselling
Streaming and online
entertainment
Construction
Here are some of the job titles that
require capabilities we know will
open larger job neighbourhoods
and enduring careers beyond the
next 180 days:
• Registered Nurses
• Customer Service
Representatives/ Advocates
• Mental Health Counsellors
• Counsellors/ Social Workers
• Logisticians
• Freight Handlers
• Warehouse Workers
• Electrical Battery Technicians
• Information Security Analysts
• Business Intelligence and
Research Analysts
• Artificial Intelligence Specialists
• Robotics Engineers (Software)
• Mechatronics Engineers
• Software Engineers
• Full Stack Engineers
• Mathematicians
• Data Scientists
• Data Engineers
• Statisticians
• Service Designers
• Homecare Health Aids
• Homecare Therapists
• Occupational Therapists
• Physiotherapists
• Forest Fire Inspectors and
Prevention Specialists
While automation was already
occurring at pace in many
industries, it accelerated during the
lockdown as some jobs were
particularly difficult to do remotely.
While many may have to take
whatever employment they can
secure, it is important, at least, to
identify jobs that may have limited
future prospects. The following are
some of the current job titles
where good post-lockdown
employment prospects may exist
but will permanently decline as
automation occurs. They also
reside in very small job
neighbourhoods where the
required capabilities may make it
difficult to transition to emerging
employment opportunities:
• Cashiers
• Retail/sales workers
• Food preparation and service
personnel
• Long-haul truck drivers
• Short-haul door-to-door
couriers
• Farmers/ Farm hands
• Postal mail sorting workers
• Machine operators
• Call Centre operators
• Data Entry clerks
• Bookkeepers/ Financial
clerks14
Image: © iStock-62 4853732
New Normal Part 2 | CONCLUSION
17
The COVID-19 “work-from-home
experiment” confirms Australian
workers are ready to respond to
radically new ways of working. The
final data on working-from-home
productivity levels is yet to emerge,
but it is apparent many wish to
continue working from home.15
Equally, a large number of
employers see no compelling
reason why they cannot extend the
choice of work location to their
workers.
Success in a post-COVID-19 world
of work, skill development, and
careers relies on individuals and
organisations understanding and
internalising five major mindshifts:
1. A job is a very unreliable way to
define our identity and our
talents
2. Full-time, office-based work
with one employer will no
longer be the norm
3. We need to find our own inner
genius
4. Qualifications may not make all
our capabilities and future
potential visible to an employer
5. Don’t just find work, find a
career and a growing job
neighbourhood
These mindshifts encourage
thinking that will help us glide more
smoothly through the increasing
turbulence as the pandemic health
crisis recedes and the economic
crisis intensifies. While we can plan
and prepare for the new world of
work (See Figure 5), as a society we
must all accept that work will never
return to normal. The gap between
how we organise work and
government occupational
classification systems will widen.
Employment, economic reward,
and promotion will no longer be
solely determined by taking 3 to 4
years to obtain a formal credential
(a qualification) in preparation for a
profession or vocation. Such
chunky, pre-packaged credentials
may be less tradable or relevant to
emerging job roles as a discrete
stack of targeted digital credentials.
Our potential may lie less in our
skills and knowledge, and more in
the way we think, emotionally
engage with others, and continually
learn, formally and informally.
To succeed, everyone in society
must acknowledge and respond to
working life’s new normal. If
nothing else the COVID-19
lockdown should provide all
workers and those seek to enter
the workforce with a shared
experience of work and its
reimagining. This will make it
easier, one hopes, to convince
people that work is transforming
and securing entry to a future-
proof career makes good sense.
CONCLUSION
A 180
-day action plan to future-proof your career
NEW NORMAL,
NEW RULES
The game we play to get
educated, find a job and stay
employed has new rules. Except
for those few who foresaw
work’s future, most of us had
little understanding or insight
into what an agile, distributed
workforce would look like. Now
we do.
New Normal Part 2 | CONCLUSION
18
Image: © iStock-1054574144
Figure
5: A 180-day post COVID-19 career future-proofing plan
New Normal Part 2 | Working Future s™
19
WORKING FUTURES™
Working Futures is a research and consultancy firm committed to investigating the future of work,
learning, and the capabilities for successful organisations, professions and individuals.
Capabilities are the whole-of-workforce knowledge, skills and
personal attributes required to perform
in a role today and the potential to rapidly adapt, learn and respond to future changes.
Working Futures commenced in 1992 and
dedicated itself to the vision of developing technologies, system-level insight, and new ways of
working to enhance organisational agility, skills development, and the role of education systems in supporting workforce deve
lopment. Since
1992 Working Futures has expanded our client base across the Australasia region with a passion for assisting
how rural, regional and remote
communities build future
-proof jobs and industries.
Within the past 30 years, we have conducted over 300 engagements with many corporate, university and public sector clients, s
uch as:
Woolworths, Commonwealth
Bank, Optus, Qantas, BHP Billiton, St George Bank, Westpac, NAB, ANZ, Wesfarmers, Telstra, Santos, Simplot,
Siemens, Coles Group, Vodafone, Visionstream, Seven Network, and Sony
-Ericsson.
Please visit
www.workingfutures.com.au for more information.
WANT TO GET IN TOUCH
DR. MARCUS BOWLES
Managing Director and Chairman for the Institute for Working Futures
and Hon. Professor, Centre for Workforce Futures, Macquarie University
Email: marc@marcbowles.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcusbowles/
Website: http://www.marcbowles.com/
Marcus is the Managing Director and Chairman for Working Futures™, where he focuses his passion for building the people and s
trategic
capability required to achieve desired futures.
He consults with large organisations, educational bodies, governments, re
gional communities, and professional bodies in Australasia.
Marcus has an established reputation in the market for not only for his work in education and training reform, but also for h
is ability to
enhance the adoption
of capabilities and technologies that deliver shared futures.
Cover Page Image:
© Can Stock Photo / Feverpitched
New Normal Part 2 | Want to get i n touch
20
1 Statsia, Number of freelance workers in
the United States from 2014 to 2019,
accessed 4 June 2020 at
https://www.statista.com/statistics/6854
68/amount-of-people-freelancing-us/.
2 I’m aware of these surveys in
organisations as diverse as banks (e.g.,
ANZ), ports (e.g., Port of Newcastle) and
federal government agencies.
3 Beatty, C. (April 2020) Covid-19 and the
workforce,
MIT Technology Review Insights
,
MIT & Faethm; Brenan, M. (April 3, 2020).
US Workers Discovering Affinity for Remote
Work.
Gallup
, gallup.com.
4 This title owes much to discussions with
Denise Leaser at GreatBizTools regarding
their MyInnerGenius® platform,
https://trywebassess.com/myinnergenius
-assessments/
5 Foundation of Young Australians (July
2017).
New work smarts: Thriving in the
new order
, FYA, Canberra.
6 Bowles, M., Ghosh, S., & Thomas, L.
(January 2020). Future-proofing
accounting professionals: Ensuring
graduate employability and future
readiness.
Journal of Teaching and
Learning for Graduate Employability,
11(
1),
2–23.
7 While the language is still evolving,
micro-credentials
should denote mini-
qualifications that demonstrate skills,
knowledge, and/or experience in a given
subject area or against a capability or
competency standard. While there are
related terms such as nanodegrees or
digital credentials, micro-credentials
should hold a defined relationship with the
macro-credential
, a qualification.
Completion should grant an entry score,
credit or advanced standing against part
of a traditional qualification like a diploma
or degree. Terms related to digital
credentials is a digital badge. Typically,
they do not have a credit relationship with
a formal qualification.
8 Tertiary institutions included public and
private accredited providers including
universities in higher education, and
registered training organisations
operating in technical, adult, vocational
education, and training sector.
9 Parthenon (May 2020)
Education
investments in a COVID-19 era
, EY.
10 Some forty years earlier the substance
of this paper was passionately presented
in Barry Jones (1982).
Sleepers, wake!:
Technology & the future of work
, OUP,
Melbourne.
11 Bowles, Ghosh, & Thomas, 2020.
12 World Economic Forum [WEF]
(September 2018).
Future of Jobs Survey
2018,
Centre for New Economy and
Society, Switzerland. Retrieved May 2019 at
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Fut
ure_of_Jobs_2018.pdf
13 Parthenon, 2020; & Australian
Governments Labour Market Information
Portal, www.lmip.gov.au
14 Beatty, 2020: 6.
15 Non-comparable studies conducted in
Ireland, England, Australia, US, and New
Zealand in May and June 2020 surveying
those working from home during COVID-
19 are reporting three consistent findings:
over 80% believe their productivity is the
same or better, although never working
remotely before at least 75% (and up to
83.5%) said they would continue working
from home in some form, and at least
40% stated they prefer working from home
on a permanent basis.