Workforce

The nature of work is rapidly changing due to emerging technologies and disruptive forces, such as AI, the gig economy, and more. The exact effect of these and other changes remain unknown, but one thing seems certain: The skills that employers value and rely upon are evolving. In turn, a “skills gap” has developed in which employers struggle to hire appropriately trained workers.

While it will take many groups across the workforce spectrum to address this issue, employers play an important role in identifying related challenges and subsequently creating and refining innovative solutions. As such, exploring how employers experience and respond to these challenges is a valuable part of the larger conversation on workforce development.

Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies have enabled automation to scale and pose legitimate workforce threats. However, these innovations are creating new jobs and recreating old ones that together shape the building blocks of a future workforce. This dynamic opportunity engine is driven in large part by a fast expanding innovation ecosystem that combines a bevy of thriving, scaling, and nascent startups and their emerging workforce needs.

The Center for State and Local Government Excellence (SLGE) has partnered with the International Personnel Management Association for Human Resources (IPMA-HR) and the National Association of State Personnel Executives (NASPE) to conduct an annual survey of public sector human resources professionals since 2009. Survey questions are focused around the workforce changes and challenges their organizations face and the initiatives they put in place to better serve their hiring and retention needs for the future.

The United States is facing a growing skills gap that threatens the nation’s long-term economic prosperity. The workforce simply does not have enough workers and skilled candidates to fill an ever-increasing number of high-skilled jobs. 7 million jobs were open in December 2018, but only 6.3 million unemployed people were looking for work. As the country nears full employment, businesses face an even greater talent shortage that will have a stifling impact on the economy and global innovation. Several factors contribute to the skills gap: low unemployment, new technologies and competition in the global landscape. The fastest growing sectors of the economy—health care and technology— require workers with some of the most highly specialized skills.

This report provides an overview of global and regional trends in employment, unemployment, labour force participation and productivity, as well as employment status, informal employment and working poverty. It also examines income and social developments, and provides an indicator of social unrest.

A key finding is that poor job quality is a prime concern for the most of the global labour force. In addition, unemployment and labour underutilization remain high in many countries, despite improvements in recent years.

The report also takes stock of progress with respect to targets for Sustainable Development Goal 8, which has been slower than anticipated.

Though technology and the workplace are changing, human nature isn't.

In our studies of the world's most successful organizations, we've learned that a culture of high employee development is the most productive environment for both businesses and employees.

Download Building a High-Development Culture Through Your Employee Engagement Strategy to learn:

• why engagement cannot be "just an HR thing"
• the fundamental needs that must be met for employees to achieve high performance
• the patterns seen in organizations that have successfully transformed into high-development cultures driven by engagement

Implementing the Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act (PMIAA) is underway by federal agencies covered by the CFO Act. Commissioned and supported with research from PMI, MIT’s Consortium for Engineering Program Management, and others, this report distills how many government agencies have been leading (and continue to lead) efforts to build and sustain good practices in portfolio, program, and project management. 

The nature and organization of work are changing rapidly and in fundamental ways. New technologies, evolving workforce demographics, shifting global demand, and related transformations in business models leave some workers in a precarious position.

Although nearly two decades have elapsed since the turn of the 21st century, the U.S. approach to education, training, and workforce development still largely operates on a 20th-century model. Workforce preparation — a linear pipeline from K–12 education to possibly college and then a job — is similar to what it was several decades ago. Labor market policies designed for the industrial age still prevail. Labor market signals and other information flows between members of the current and future workforce, education and training institutions, and employers have not kept pace with the revolutionary changes in information processing.

Whether you’re an optimist pointing to predictions of job creation or you’ve been worrying that a robot might be after your job, one thing is for certain. The world of work is going through a period of arguably unprecedented change at the hands of machines; automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are the new kids on the employment block.

Employers need more from their people than ever before if they are to stay relevant and competitive. And similarly, employees expect – even demand – more from the organizations they work for. Now, a global survey of 5,000 human resources professionals and hiring managers, combined with behavioural data analysis, conducted by LinkedIn has revealed the four trends most likely to affect the next few years of your career.