The future of work — Jennifer Byrne

Quotes

• “First of all, technology can solve a lot of the problems that it creates. If you think of technology as inadvertently creating a scenario where a lot of people aren’t going to have the skills they need to do the job they want, then technology can also help solve that problem by creating online programs and digital access to those various skills that people need and that was not the case before.” -Jennifer“The shift to, it’s now okay to have online certifications on your resume? That was not the case. Now it’s becoming more acceptable. There are now platforms who can make skills available so technology is solving the problem it has also created.” -Jennifer“In technology, you can wake up and reinvent yourself. This is very personal to me because I got my career in technology with online education.” -Jennifer“I think this is a positive thing forpeople that are thinking about new roles and working in new industries. I generally say this about social media. There is no time where you’re behind in the learning curve of social media because the platforms iterate so quickly and the features set changes so quickly that no matter when you start, you’re only six months behind. The tools and technologies and what’s really relevant and what works right now has been out for six months and guess what? It’s going to change by the end of the year. That means there’s always opportunity because there’s always innovation so you can be on the cutting edge.” -Ben “I think that social media has created an environment where branding yourself is extremely important and we’re all doing it to a certain extent and so it has become the expectation. That if I looked at someone's LinkedIn profile, I want to see their story. I want to understand the ‘why’ of what they’re doing and it gives me a clue whether they are authentically interested in the job that they are trying to get.” -Jennifer“You mentioned personal branding, having a narrative, understanding the problems that you could solve, being able to tell the story of how you’re going from Point A to Point B, and what your point C is. Then there’s the idea of distributing the message. Getting it into the hands of the people that matter the most.” -Ben “The bigger thing is spending time figuring out what kind of skills you think you need and how you string together your story. There’s a huge demand for tech jobs and this isn’t a big problem to find opportunities, it’s a bigger problem to make sure that you’ve positioned yourself well to go get one of them.” -Jennifer“I think one prevailing conversation in this area is that it’s not jobs necessarily that will go away. It’s just that tasks will get re-organized. If you really dissect any job, there are probably anywhere between 8 and 80 things, discrete tasks within that job depending on what it is. The technology isn’t going to do all of those things. Technology is going to pick off a little bit.” -Jennifer“It is changing fast, relatively speaking but it is going to change in a very small increment. Where it’s going to change is it will start with anything that is a routine task. What is going to remain are non-routine things.” -Jennifer