The Future of Work – Four ways work will change

Speakers at “The Future of Work,” an all-day symposium held at Stanford’s Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center on August 30, explored the changing workplace, new possibilities for higher education, and technology’s impact on careers and industries. The event, attended by about 300 people, was presented by Stanford Career Education and OZY EDU, the education arm of online magazine OZY.

Following are some of the ideas discussed at the event, which included keynote speeches, panel discussions, and a hands-on workshop on career and life planning.

Embracing the Liberal Arts

Students are hesitating to major in the humanities and social sciences out of fear that those degrees will lead only to low-wage jobs, says Harry Elam, Jr.., Stanford’s senior vice provost for education. Yet those fields remain crucially important to industry, which needs liberal arts students for countless tasks, such as to help understand biases in data, facilitate collaboration, bring insight, provide historical perspective, and “humanize technology in a data-driven world,” he says.

Learning Throughout Life

Speakers generally agreed that the traditional brick-and-mortar college campus will certainly remain because the face-to-face encounters in and outside the classroom are educationally and socially valuable. After graduation, though, employees will increasingly need continuing education to stay competitive, and companies recognize that, says Julia Stiglitz, vice-president at Coursera who earned her Stanford MBA in 2010.

Michael Moe, co-founder of GSV Asset Management, notes that over the course of their careers, people will augment “the three R’s” of reading, writing, and arithmetic that they learned early in life with “the four C’s” of critical thinking, communication, creativity, and cultural fluency.

Restructuring Roles and Workweeks

Research suggests that by 2030, about half of today’s jobs will be gone. Speakers agreed that automation will perform many current blue-collar and white-collar jobs, while independent contractors will fill a large fraction of future positions. Robots and other automation in the short term will displace individual workers, but technology over the long term is likely to create new economic opportunity and new jobs. “While automation eats jobs, it doesn’t eat work,” says Moe.

Aiming for Equity

Companies are committing to a diverse workforce for varying motivations. Some believe that diverse teams are just “smarter and more creative,” says Joelle Emerson, adjunct lecturer at Stanford GSB and founder and chief executive of diversity strategy firm Paradigm. Other firms, especially technology companies, believe that they’re disproportionately responsible for designing the future and therefore it’s simply wrong to leave entire communities out of their teams, Emerson says.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at Four Ways Work Will Change in the Future | Stanford Graduate School of Business