Re: Skill

In The Entrepreneur and the Professional, I brought up the challenges at work faced by my generation. The focus was on an approach to work and the changes that have been forced on it because of rapidly shifting business environments. In addition to the business’ external dynamics, another factor that has been changing the organisation is the entry of a different kind of workforce.

“How the Millennial Workforce is Changing Business” calls this a revolution, and writes further that they will prepare the organisation for the future by making them Digital, Clear, Fluid, Fast. PwC’s layered report on the same subject brings out this workforce’ motivations, acknowledges the generational tensions and suggests what the organisation would need to do to attract, develop and manage millennials. 

An important line of expectation that emerges is learning, skill development and faster growth. The dependency of the previous generation on its skill sets honed over time is something I had pointed to in my earlier post, along with the related facet of the increasingly short shelf life of these skill sets. Essentially means that the way forward for all, irrespective of generation, is a mindset on skills.

In Change Strategies, which was on organisations’ approach to business models amidst shifting landscapes, I’d written about adjacency platforms and full stack startups. In a “why didn’t I think of it” experience, I discovered this fantastic post by Chris Messina titled ‘The full-stack employee“. The point of the post – as the conventional seams between disciplines fray, the work force needs to be polymaths. Experts in a core domain and its shifting nature, comfortable dealing with multiple disciplines, and making lifestyle choices that enable them to remove ambiguity from certain sections of their life, they seem best placed to be the harbingers of a new era of work.

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P.S. Of course, when AI strikes, this becomes an even more complex subject 🙂