Toby Peyton-Jones – HR Director, Siemens

Toby opened by about the paradox of needing to anticipate the future in a world in which we can’t predict the future. Siemens does base their strategy on megatrends (e.g. demographics, urbanisation, climate change, globalisation) that look like they will continue, barring any kind of black swan event. The half-life of knowledge is getting shorter, and shortening innovation cycles are changing everything.

The future of jobs and skills in 2030 reports are available to download here – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jobs-and-skills-in-2030 – and examines 13 trends that are believed to be most influential on UK jobs and skills to 2030, including the following:

• Demographic change, especially an ageing population.
• Growing diversity
• Growing desire for a better work-life balance
• Changing work environments shaped by IT
• Converging technologies and cross-disciplinary skills
• ICT development and the age of big data, the power of digital devices and the potential to capture and use vast amounts of data.
• Changed economic perspectives due to globalisation and technological change
• Shift to Asia, growing economic power and influence of countries in the East.
• New business ecosystems leading companies to be increasingly defined as ‘network orchestrators.’
• Growing scarcity of natural resources

Toby suggested that volatility and uncertainty will continue and that we’ll see ongoing ‘gentle change’ as well as reaching inflection points when we’ll see significant disruptive change. Two areas were highlighted as being ripe for significant disruptive change; education and healthcare.

Toby then talked us through some of the possible disruptions that we face, suggesting that we need to think through hoe these scenarios might impact us:

• Changing values of employees, where workers select employers on the basis of alignment with their own values
• Zero-hour contracts become the norm
• Anytime, anywhere skills delivery, enabled by virtual and peer-to-peer learning
• Artificial intelligence
• Geographically alternative centres of excellence, the UK’s leading position in key economic sectors is lost to high growth economies
• Disrupted Internet developments due to cyber crime

Lots of things for us to think about for the future!