The sculptor produces an admirable statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed-He defines it as the process of elimination. Perhaps, in our context, the sculptor may be an emerging leader, an entrepreneur or part of the global workforce.

“It is the business of the future to be dangerous” said philosopher Alfred North Whitehead more than eight decades ago. In times of ceaseless change, organizations that do not adapt the status quo are in danger of irrelevancy — or worse, extinction.

Change is put on after burns, with uniformity and complexity completing the trio of success in 2020. The epoch of 2020 is impending rapidly, with a myriad of divergent future promises, particularly the way the global workforce is sourced.

We are witnessing the biggest economic, social and demographic shifts in history. Aging populations will result in fewer workers, innovators, and consumers while the emerging markets in hyper growth areas will reinvent how business has been done and revolutionize the workforce of the future.

CUSP OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

 We are now immersed in the fourth phase of globalisation that is likely to be wrapped-around technologies, biometrics, with built-in geopositioning. Fledglings of 2020 would be seen handling miniaturized video cameras connected to wireless networks and our houses equipped with organic LED displays that can be folded like origami. It would be workaday to see employees wearing their communications tomorrow. A successful example of this is Uber that has gained momentum using Smartphone technology. As digital information mounts at unprecedented speed, there will be demand for workers who can handle large amounts of data. Most likely, the upcoming decade will see booming social media, networking and mostly things would be based on artificial intelligence with the prospering of areas like virtual reality and development of smart workplaces. Work environments that become direct extensions of the human senses, including gesture-based interfaces.Cybercrime will be a keyshaper of how the Internet is being governed and how companies engage in the workspace.

FLIP FLOPPING IN WORKING TRENDS

 Globalisation is no longer simply a matter of establishing dependent field offices, recruiting some employees and partners locally, and making a few superficial product alterations to meet national regulations. Today’s global markets are culturally mixed and sophisticated, requiring organizations to recruit a workforce diverse enough to deal with the subtleties of doing business where multinational companies have traditionally not had a significant presence. New business models moving towards a smaller core is to be witnessed in the upcoming decade.

Futurists predict that by 2020 the appreciation of human capital, in the sense of both building employee value and attaching greater value to each employee will become not just an organizational aspiration, but also an economic necessity. With the growing trends in gender diversity in the workplace, the new workforce will overturn many traditional attitudes about workers, working, and the workplace.

This can be achieved by proper talent sourcing and social recruiting by using social and cloud technologies to uncover hidden sources of top talent, LinkedIn and GitHUb being the path followers. That is the 2020 workplace needs to be a place where the employee wants to come and work. Enterprise social tools for employee engagement should be adopted. Additionally, collaboration tools like Google apps are changing the way people work by shifting the idea from individual contribution to collective effort. In all, it is more about enabling the right connections, like those to information, work, and time. Workplace 2020 should be fun, walking by me 24X7, because now is the time to reimagine what’s possible.

PAVING THE WAY TO SUCCESS

 Talent mobility is in the grip of a major change with a 50% predicted growth in mobile employees by 2020. The growing importance of emerging markets has created a significant shift in mobility patterns. Skilled employees from emerging markets are increasingly in demand at home and abroad.

Domestic multinationals are increasingly attractive to local talent. International assignments are mostly driven by large multinationals based in the US and Europe. The flow of talent is still predominantly from West to East, or intracontinental, but companies begin to tap into rich talent pools in emerging markets, particularly India and China. Global mobility continues to grow in volume. In the next ten years, the companies are likely to deploy talent from around the globe. Building the 2020 workforce requires companies to focus on the many changes, opportunities, and risks at hand.

Job requirements and skills profiles are rapidly changing.

Growing computing power and large amounts of data are increasingly making it possible to understand and anticipate changes in labour markets in near-real time, and to re-shape education and training policies in a timelier manner to help narrow the widening skills gap of the youth. Increased collaboration between stakeholders such as online talent platforms like LinkedIn, human resources consulting firms, employers, policymakers, labour unions and education providers, has the potential to substantially improve the speed and precision of future workforce planning and managing organizational change.

At the national level, countries experience varying inflows and outflows of talent over time. It’s hardly surprising, then, that talent management is right at the top of agendas of ceos like Indra Nooyi who plan to devote more attention to developing the talent pipeline and an insight of hiring more women leaders, just around the corner. Thus, things are changing as per the latest requirements and will change in a manner so as to benefit both the employee so that he gets job satisfaction as well as the recruiting firm which is also satisfied with  the fact of recruiting well equipped employees.

THE WINDUP

 Thus, I would wrap by, the 2020 workforce comprising of the youth, being the light at the end of the tunnel, to be increasingly flexible, as alternatives to the traditional relationships between employer and employee grow in popularity with a wider group of ages and nationalities than ever before, so companies will need to have a broader understanding of their people and the markets in which they operate.

Perhaps, a 2020 workforce employee is expected to be an ideal combination of deep subject expertise along with 21st century skills like critical thinking, creativity and foresight. They are expected to be well prepared for the challenging augmented human characteristics. Information technology is likely to create new forms of intelligence that will migrate into the infrastructure.Thus; the job givers as well as the job takers will be subjected to many more challenges and how they fight back those challenges will give a vision to the workforce and in turn the upcoming economies.