Accelerating Technological Change

• Technological innovation, bringing both job destruction and job creation, as human labour is either substituted or complemented with machines 
• Sudden shifts in customer needs, resulting in new business models, faster product innovation and new ways of working 
• Technology-enabled opportunities to monetise free services (such as web services) or underutilised assets (such as personal consumption data)





Shifting Labour Demographics

• Ageing populations in many parts of the world, creating shortages of labour and placing a greater onus on productivity for driving growth.  
• Urbanisation of the working population 
• Increasingly diverse workforce, moving away from a model dominated by white male breadwinners to a workforce including elderly, women, students, people with disabilities, migrants, ethnic minorities etc. 





Changing Employee Expectations

• Increased popularity of flexible, self-directed forms of work that allow for a better work-life balance 
• More widespread desire for work with a purpose enabling self-realisation and fulfilment and for more opportunities to influence the way work is delivered (autonomy, interactions, etc.) 
• Rise of multi-activity / slashers & renewed appetite for entrepreneurship 





Diversification of Forms of Work

• Coexistence of different ways to contract and employ labour (e.g. temporary, part-time, remote, outsourced, on-call, online work) 
• Emergence of new platforms providing access to talent (freelancing, labour-sharing)   
• Delivery of work through complex partner ecosystems (involving multiple industries, geographies, and organisations of different sizes), rather than within a single organisation.



Business Models Redefined for a Volatile and Complex Environment

• Greater economic and political volatility leading to higher uncertainty 
• Mass-customisation and the rise of an on-demand economy (“Platformisation”) 
• Servicification of manufacturing 
• Rise of the extended firm, made of networks of suppliers, subcontractors and partners (global supply chain management) 
• New regulation aimed at controlling technology use (for example, “robot taxes”) 



Changing Demand for Skills

• General increase in the skills, technical knowledge, and formal education required to perform work 
• Increasing need for soft skills and ability for life-long learning to ensure long-term employability 
• Technological innovation impacting skill sets and calling for upskilling / reskilling 
• New forms of learning (massification of education, MOOCs & tutorials, etc.)