As businesses seek more flexibility, it forecasts they will decrease the size of their core workforces, instead relying on networks of project-based workers.
Work with your great-grandchildren in job of the future
Welcome to the future of work, where your colleagues will be old enough to be your great-grandparents and your competitors will be algorithms.
That is the vision of workplace changes over the next two decades in a report published on Monday by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, a government-backed body.
The Future of Work forecasts that multi-generational working – so-called four-generation or 4G workplaces – will become increasingly common as people delay retiring until their 70s or even 80s.
It also predicts that the role of women in the workplace will strengthen and that the divide will grow between those at the top and bottom of the career ladder. That means that while skilled, highly paid professionals will push for a better work-life balance, others will experience increasing job and income insecurity.
Technology will continue to evolve, pervading work environments everywhere, it suggests, with many routine tasks becoming the domain of smart algorithms. It will become the norm for people to be "virtually" present at work using multimedia.
As businesses seek more flexibility, it forecasts they will decrease the size of their core workforces, instead relying on networks of project-based workers.
While the report makes grim reading for some, it says there is also good news. Increasing demand for personalised goods and services will lead to a boom in "micropreneurism", helped by technological developments that provide greater access to markets, innovation and cost savings.
Large companies will open up their business models, focusing more on the skills and knowledge they can connect to rather than those that they own. They will run research and development programmes, giving individuals and small businesses the chance to innovate.
Toby Peyton-Jones, human resources director for Siemens in the UK and northwest Europe, and a UKCES commissioner, acknowledged that gazing into the future was hazardous.
"If some of the predictions of the past had been true, we'd be living in a world with no internet, driving hover-cars and enjoying huge amounts of leisure time," he said. "Some things are unstoppable forces – the rise of technology, for example. Other influences are subtle and fragile, yet potentially even more significant. I'd count things like the attitudes and culture of people born in the digital generation among these," he said.
Ian Brinkley, chief economist at the Work Foundation think-tank, said demographics and globalisation could become more disruptive, speeding the rise and fall of industries and business models and creating economic winners and losers on a bigger scale than in the past.
He said: "Making sure such change creates new and better job opportunities for all workers and not just a few has to be the major challenge for government, and developing innovative, inclusive and ambitious policies focused on education and skills must be at the heart of an effective response."
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