Edumorfosis.Work

If statistics are to be believed, this business model is likely to change the face of employment over the next few years. As a nation, we are now moving away from the traditional concept of work being something that takes place during designated hours in a specific setting to one in which work and life are increasingly integrated.

This can have its drawbacks, with people who work from home often complaining that their work now invades every aspect of their lives rather than existing within set parameters. There is a sense of being ‘on call’, yet many people are choosing to work from home because it conveys significant benefits compared with being confined to an office.

Employers must sit up and take notice. There are now 1.5 million home workers in the UK, of which 900,000 are women. This is not to mention the other 4.2 million who work from home some of the time.

Working more than 39 hours a week is bad for your mental and physical health, a new study says.

Australian National University researchers are calling for a drop in the the internationally-accepted 48-hour work week, agreed to about 80 years ago to avoid worker burn-out.

They've published a research paper, 'Not all hours are equal: could time be a social determinant of health?', after examining the work lives of 8000 adults.

Even if those jobs returned, a high school diploma is simply no longer good enough to fill them. Yet rarely discussed in the political debate over lost jobs are the academic skills needed for today’s factory-floor positions, and the pathways through education that lead to them.

Many believe that the solution is for more Americans to go to college. But the college-for-all movement, which got its start in the 1970s as American manufacturing began its decline, is often conflated with earning a bachelor’s degree.

With college tuition soaring nationwide, many Americans don’t have the time or money to earn a college degree. However, that doesn’t mean your job prospects are diminished. Increasingly, there are many companies offering well-paying jobs to those with non-traditional education or a high-school diploma.

“When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people,” said Google’s former SVP of People Operations Laszlo Bock.

“Academic qualifications will still be taken into account and indeed remain an important consideration when assessing candidates as a whole, but will no longer act as a barrier to getting a foot in the door,” added Maggie Stilwell, Ernst and Young’s managing partner for talent.

What’s to become of the traditional work office?

Is it possible that communications tools like Skype, Zoom.us and Google Hangouts will have the effect of making communal office spaces obsolete?

Is the day coming when organizations will redeploy workers to home offices – where they’ll have no commute, and the freedom to work all day in play clothes?

A few years ago, researchers at iconic furniture maker, Herman Miller, began a deep-dive into the future of the global workplace driven by the desire to answer questions like these. Clearly, technology already makes it possible for many people to work away from conventional offices. The question is whether that’s ultimately the best thing for workers, not to mention the companies that employ them.

Let’s start with the good news: manufacturing is returning to North America. It is called “re-shoring” and is happening for several reasons. Chief among these is that labour costs in Canada and the United States are becoming relatively more competitive as the Chinese economy soared and wages there gradually caught up to more developed economies. But there are other factors at play here, too.

In North America, corporate tax rates have become more globally competitive, as has the cost of energy. Land is also far cheaper in North America. To find 500 acres for a large manufacturing facility in Alberta, you look out a window. In Guangzhou? Even five acres could be a challenge. When you also consider the additional cost of shipping goods from Asia to North America, the case for simply making it here becomes even stronger.

Despite technological progress promising to solve many of Europe’s problems, people still worry about robots and automation costing jobs. But this anxiety is based on fear, not reason, warns Thilo Brodtmann.

Workers are switching careers after being made redundant, want to earn more money, or are bored in their job, new research shows.

A study by the Co-op found that more than half of people over the age of 50 have had at least three different jobs.

The White House published a report last month that reinforced this view. Some of the headline stats:

• 83 percent of the jobs where people make less than $20 per hour will be subject to automation or replacement.
• Between 9 percent and 47 percent of jobs are in danger of being made irrelevant because of technological change, with the worst threats falling among the less educated.
• Between 2.2 and 3.1 million car, bus and truck driving jobs in the U.S. will be eliminated by the advent of self-driving vehicles.

We know that the jobs of tomorrow will require skills steeped in technology. We also realize that today’s students live surrounded by technology that wasn’t a reality for the generations before them. Technology can improve how students learn both in and out of the classroom. We truly believe that the startups that have been and will be a part of the AT&T Aspire Accelerator will be the individuals helping to shape what the future of edtech will look like, and we’re excited to be along for this important ride.

Disruptive technologies are now dictating our future, as new innovations increasingly blur the lines between physical, digital, and biological realms.

Robots are already in our operating rooms and fast-food restaurants; we can now use 3D imaging and stem-cell extraction to grow human bones from a patient’s own cells; and 3D printing is creating a circular economy in which we can use and then reuse raw materials.

This tsunami of technological innovation will continue to change profoundly how we live and work, and how our societies operate.

In what is now called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, technologies that are coming of age — including robotics, nanotechnology, virtual reality, 3D printing, the internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and advanced biology — will converge.

In the last couple of years, I have spoken to many corporate Learning and Development practitioners about how they may support and enable opportunities for their workforce to learn collaboratively with each other in and during the flow of their every day work. That is, “social learning’.

 

During these conversations, I noticed that there were some myths about social learning that I would like to dispel.

Via LGA

YOUNG PEOPLE AT work are taking responsibility for their own ability, which may not be a good thing say researchers at a university in Sweden.

According to researchers at Sahlgrenska Academy at Gothenburg University, young people regard themselves as being responsible for acquiring new knowledge and motivation in the workplace.