Of all the significant, probing questions exercising the online community over the last week, few have had the column inches/eyeballs/attention (take your pick) of the dress. Not just any dress. The dress. The blue and black one. No, no, the gold and white one. Or maybe I was right first time. What colours did you see? It divided opinions, schools of thought, even households – apparently Kanye West didn’t agree with Ms Kardashian. According to Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist from the US, the phenomenon is down to the way different human beings discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis – some discount the blue side and see a white and gold dress, others discount the gold side and the dress is blue and black. Obviously.
Such technological answers are opening so many doors, opening up so many possibilities. A great piece in the Economist this week touches on the Steve Jobs’ quote of just eight years ago when he unveiled the iPhone for the first time – ‘This will change everything’. He wasn’t wrong and, in light of subsequent events, a somewhat humble and understated forecast from the erstwhile Apple leader. Looking back, today’s smartphones have more processing power than NASA scientists had access to when they put a man on the moon in 1969. And the iPhone continues to change everything – in 2014’s final quarter, Apple shipped 75m of them, up from 50m the year before.
And there are any number of beneficiaries from the march of technology. Not least those entrepreneurs responsible for delivering great technology to market. The Forbes’ list of billionaires out this week sees Mark Zuckerberg place in the top 20 richest people in the world for the first time. Further down the list, but still probably unlikely to be worrying about when their next pay day falls, is Snapchat owner Evan Spiegel, the two founders of taxi app Uber and the three creators of accommodation website Airbnb. Such riches however are cascading down too. This month saw Apple unveiling plans to open £1.7bn data centres in both Ireland and Denmark – the company’s largest ever investment in Europe.
No surprise then that organisations such as Apple, Google and Amazon have such stellar employer brands. They offer highly competitive remuneration levels, cachet, progression, work/life consideration, intellectual challenge and more.
But will this always be the case?
The last few months have seen growing concern being articulated around what computers and robotic technology will do for jobs. A joint report from late last year from Deloitte and the University of Oxford suggests that such technologies will eliminate the need for around 10m UK jobs – or a hefty third of the working population with just 20 years.
The report goes on to suggest that jobs in manufacturing are most at risk as well as those that involve repetitive processing, clerical duties, telephony based functions and support services. The report suggests that functions involving creative thought, people management, entrepreneurialism, problem solving and interpersonal skills will be largely immune to such threats.
Deloitte, in their Global Human Capital Trends, out this month, extend this thinking, positing machines and technology not acting as competition for workers but increasingly collaborating with them.
Both employers and employees (as well as nascent employees) need to ensure that skill sets reflect what the workplace needs tomorrow, not what it has always demanded of people. Because, in many cases, it rather soon won’t be people doing those jobs.
Employment evolution is likely to become revolution. Change is already with us – since 2001, 65% of all librarian posts have disappeared and nearly 50% of PAs. And this change is only going to speed up much like the march of technology. From Mr Jobs’ unveiling of the first iPhone eight years ago, no fewer than 1.2bn smartphones were sold in 2014, an annual hike of 28%.
Organisations and their employer brands have to make it abundantly clear how they will prepare individuals for the future, enhancing their CVs and making individuals more marketable and more adaptable for a tomorrow which looks less and less like today.
This week’s findings from the graduate market from EY probably reflect this sense of realisation and pragmatism from early career audiences. Despite a graduate job market firming by the month, the most important factor influencing student job choice is not salary and benefits – down now to fifth place. Students are now more interested in making choices and taking decisions for the long term, working for organisations in which they can get a diverse range of experiences, accelerating their learning and creating sustainable careers with longevity.
The UK job market is undoubtedly in a positive place. Glassdoor just last week suggested that 39% of UK workers would be looking for a new job if they didn’t get a salary increase this year. Glassdoor also claim that the figure for organisations losing talent as a result will amount to an eye-watering £360bn. And, according to the PMI, UK companies hired staff in February at the second fastest pace since records began in 1997.
Whilst it would be supremely naive to assume that money does not enter the employee-employer equation, technology-based workplace change is only going to increase. Those individuals simply chasing a fatter salary and those employers happy to offer such increases may find themselves out of step with a workplace that will see the march of technology replacing jobs in far more functions than we might ever have assumed in the past.
Whether we see the dress as black and blue or gold and white; whether we see the embracing of processing and robotic technology as collaborative or competitive within the workplace, those employers that can demonstrate a commitment to and investment in future skills will be the employer branding winners tomorrow.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 