I felt honoured to be a presenter and facilitator at The Women’s Foundation’s first ever alumni reunion.
The session was attended by over 100 of Hong Kong’s smartest and most influential women and focused around the topic career transitions and transformations. Our session was called ‘The Future of Work – taking control of your career’.
The digital, global world that we live in today is already starting to change the way we work. We can’t fail to notice our growing reliance on technology and we are now at a a point where it has opened up new career possibilities. For example, there has been a major shift from traditional 9-5 employment contracts to a world of freelancers or temporary contract workers. In fact, 1 in 3 Americans are now part of this ‘freelance gig economy’, engaged by businesses for their specialist skills and accessible to work all over the world. This creates a win-win; the freelancer has flexibility, more control of workload and is often financially better off, the business/employer reduces risk and cost of taking on a full time employee and often benefits from higher quality work through being able to select those with the best knowledge, experience and skills for the task at hand.
Furthermore, automation and replacement of people with robots is now becoming reality. The first “Artificial Intelligence” Board members are now in place, recognised for their strength of decision making and the Bank of England is predicting that by 2025, robots may have replaced around a third of the world’s workers.
At the session, we shared our new framework to capture the key steps and activities to support proactive career management in light of this future environment. This framework was borne from a combination of relevant research and personal experiences of successful and unsuccessful career transformations. in my view, what makes this framework different from others is;
1) The focus on putting a future lens on career aspirations and;
2) The strong need to validate and monitor career decisions against your ‘core’ i.e. who you are, what you stand for and your natural way of operating.
For more information about running a similar workshop to support individuals’ career planning, please contact Austen Advisory.