In anticipating changes in working life, it is essential to consider how we can respond to change

Working life has always changed with the rest of society. This development create new professions and requires new skills. We are currently living in a phase of the so-called industrial revolution where we are increasingly working with digitalisation and machines.

The job of futures research is to assess the course of future developments: what phenomena exist today, what we can deduce from them, in which direction they might go and in which direction we would like them to go.

Anticipation of the future is guided by so-called megatrends, phenomena that affect different aspects of life around the world. Sitra, The Finnish Innovation Fund, defined the megatrends of 2023 as, for example, the erosion of nature's carrying capacity, the growing challenges to well-being and the intensification of competition for digital power.

“However, megatrends don’t affect all sectors in working life, nor do they affect different sectors in the same way. By looking at megatrends, we can consider what they mean in concrete terms for work, in other words whether work, skills and the needs for skills are changing,” says Sari Miettinen (pictured), a project specialist at the University of Turku's Finland Futures Research Centre.

The biggest change in working practices – Finland faces the challenge of an ageing population

According to Sari Miettinen, the biggest change in working life is in the way we do work. There will still be familiar occupations, such as drivers, food service people and machinists, but in the future these jobs may be done differently to how they are now, and they may involve things that are different to what they have been up to now. Digitalisation and the internet are the main drivers of this change.

Global warming will cause shortages of material in the future. Our work, skills and training must be geared towards ensuring that we can continue to do the same things we are doing now, despite the shortage of materials.

People today are worried that, in the future, machines will take their jobs.

“This highlights the question of which jobs are better done by people than by digitalisation and machines. These include many tasks that require precision, as well as tasks that involve meeting people, emotions and creativity. It’s also necessary to consider which jobs we do want to hand over to machines,” Miettinen points out.

In Finland, working life is gradually being affected by the changing age structure, as the number of young people of working age decreases relative to older people.

“We need to think about how to make work accessible to people of different ages and how society can make use of the contribution of people of different ages. The current thinking is that you can only represent one role at a time, be it student, worker, entrepreneur or pensioner. According to this thinking, a person can’t represent several roles at the same time, and this inflexibility should be eliminated.”

According to Miettinen, in the future we will also be asking very fundamental questions: why do we need work, what will work mean in the future, and will work include more than just paid work.

The importance of developing skills that are independent of change

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) assesses future skills requirements in working life. According to these assessments, the use of devices in the future, for example, will involve either human-to-human or human-to-machine interaction. The ability to interact with different groups of people will also be an important skill due to the mobility of the workforce. People will also increasingly be required to set themselves goals and limits and to relate them to their work.

However, Sari Miettinen points out that the OECD's forecasts are not cast in stone, but just an individual view of future skills needs. According to the Finland Futures Research Centre, it is not even particularly meaningful to think about what skills and jobs will be like in, say, ten years' time, because we cannot know for sure.

“It’s more useful to consider the skills that it will be useful to develop, whatever the future nature of work may be. Then you don't have to guess what specific skills will be needed in the future, because these skills will help you to acquire any kind of competence. This will enable us to perform better in the world of work – whatever it turns out to be.”

Miettinen lists openness to new things, the ability to perceive different alternatives and the ability to be critical when necessary as examples of such general-interest skills. It is also important for people to be able to take responsibility for their own choices and actions, and to be able to reflect on why they act in a certain way.

According to the Finland Futures Research Centre, more important than knowing what will happen in the future is how we respond to change. It is important for people to strengthen their ability to tolerate the fact that we cannot know for sure what will happen. It would also be useful to reflect on what needs to change and what does not. There should be more than one possible answer to the question of what the changes might result in.

Competence identity

Sari Miettinen says that, in today's working world, there is too much focus on qualifications, i.e. whether a qualification meets a certain standard and which country's educational system it was obtained in. An example of the problem is people from an immigrant background and with a high level of education working in Finland in jobs that do not correspond in any way to their education. Flexibility would be needed, i.e. the ability to see skills that exist outside the qualification.

“People learn a profession and develop a professional identity, but too easily get stuck in the idea that a profession represents everything they are. We should learn to recognise other skills that we have acquired during our lives. At the Finland Futures Research Centre, we talk about competence identity. Employers should also consider whether they recognise and want to see all the skills and how all the skills can be brought to the fore and put to use.”

Competence can be deepened or combined into new areas. 

“Once you’ve identified your skills, you should consider whether you want and need additional ones, in other words whether you need to learn new ones. Do you know of other people who know things you don't know and with whom you could collaborate? Employers should also consider how they can enable complementarity and collaboration between different skills,” Miettinen points out, predicting that, in the future, work will be created from new and unexpected combinations of skills that develop from the skills of both individuals and multiple people.