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Accountancy Ireland Magazine Article

An article by John Fitzgerald featured in Accountancy Ireland recently – the magazine for Chartered Accountants in Ireland. In the article he talks about why we should all care about the future of work. In short, our employability depends on it.
Read on https://www.charteredaccountants.ie/Accountancy-Ireland/Home/AI-Articles/the-age-of-disruption

The Age of Disruption

Why should you care about the future of work? In short, your employability depends on it. There are huge similarities in the approaches being taken to both the future of work and climate change. It’s out there, we know it’s happening; but we are too busy in our daily work to give it sufficient time and thought, thereby limiting our capacity to adapt before it’s too late. Most readers will be familiar with Stephen Covey’s time management quadrant. The future of work is in quadrant two: not urgent, but important. We tend to focus on the urgent to-do list and the reality of meeting deadlines. In this article, I will outline the importance of investing time in your future employability and explain why everyone should care about the future of work.

Why should you care?

The average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 organisation is just 15 years, so individuals can no longer assume that employment is for life. Business competitors no longer come from within your industry sector; they mostly sprout up and scale at speed to grab huge market share. Airbnb was not started by hoteliers, Uber was not founded within the taxi industry, Netflix was not started within the media industry. This speed of change will catch you unaware if you are busy with your head down.
Accountancy firms compete fiercely to hire entry level graduates. However, they will need fewer graduates in the future as an increasing variety of manual tasks become automated. As accountants, you learned your trade as juniors by conducting audits in industry. You got to see and understand how businesses operate in real life. How will graduates get this experience if and when the work is automated? Change is required in the education and integration of accounting graduates into the future world of work.
While Ireland is in the midst of an employment boom, we are witnessing the rise of corporate outplacement programmes as finance and accounting roles become automated. These roles, along with administration and middle management, featured consistently in the Harmonics Global Future of Work Study as the top three roles in decline. The work you did in the past is changing rapidly. Almost every organisation is undertaking a lean transformation or robotic process automation project of routine manual-entry tasks to achieve greater scale, speed and cost efficiency. As an example, Revenue’s move to real-time data as part of its PAYE Modernisation programme eliminates the need for the P30, P45 and P60 forms, along with end-of-year returns. Digits on a spreadsheet are easily mapped into software applications, which takes the pain away and simplifies work. PwC recently launched a digital fitness app for employees worldwide to accelerate and upskill the digital knowledge of its people across a range of domains. Digital acumen is now a lifelong endeavour, which needs to be embraced to stay employable.
Big data is valuable and business intelligence dashboards offer real-time data on key business metrics. Artificially intelligent machines will provide answers, but our potential in the future of work is in the questions we ask. Think about a calculator – we’ve all used one to do a quick calculation. The next stage was Googling a simple question to get an instant answer. Now, imagine inputting a complex accounting scenario into a computer programme, and back come your options. In this scenario, massive computational power has replaced manual effort. Indeed, computing is increasing in power and reducing in price – in 2023, it is expected that €1,000 will buy you computational power equivalent to that of the human brain. A recent World Economic Forum report estimated that total work tasks in 2018 were 70/30 in favour of humans over machines.
This will evolve speedily to 60/40 by 2022. We are not far off equilibrium in terms of the ratio between human and machine tasks in the workplace, and this demands change on our part. Like our organisations, we too have new competitors for our work – smart machines – and we need to learn how to work with them, rather than compete with them, into the future. The smart machines I speak of are software bots that are learning 24/7 and replicating the work we currently do on our computers.

The Organisational Impact

The hierarchical organisation chart that once created vertical career ladders in a functional silo no longer makes sense. This is a major challenge for future organisation design. The organisation chart of the future is organic and constantly evolving. Work architecture needs to be broken up like Lego and reconfigured into human and machine pieces. Organisations are neither resourced nor ready for such an eventuality. Like Lego, the work pieces will need be broken down and reconfigured for every new business challenge. This will lead to the demise of rigid functional silos and will require agile and cross-functional networked systems that evolve to meet specific customer needs.
What can you do now? You can prepare by letting go of the past – something we, as humans, find very hard to do. We like routine, certainty and security. Accounting roles are transitioning away from day-to-day number crunching to focus more on interpreting data, building financial models aligned to company strategies/initiatives and project-based work with key stakeholders and other departments. I speak about the nine critical human skills needed in my new book, Future Proof Your Career, which will be available soon on Amazon. The future of work will demand lifelong devotion to the development of critical human skills including critical thinking, communication, creativity, consulting, commercial acumen, collaboration and embracing new cultures – all of which will need to be complemented by ever-changing digital skills. It is not only a skillset shift that is required, but a mindset one. If you have a fixed mindset, resist change and are unwilling to upskill, then your job and your future employability is in jeopardy – but this is within your control.
Finally, I invite you to take part in our global future career readiness research project. It is aimed at working professionals to honestly evaluate how future-ready you are. The Future Career Readiness Index is a powerful instrument that allows you to quickly test your future career readiness in five key areas. It takes less than 10 minutes to benchmark yourself against others in your sector and profession. On completion, you will receive a free downloadable Future Career Readiness report to accelerate your future career. You can access the report at www.futurecareerreadiness.com.My parting career advice is this: disrupt yourself before you are disrupted.
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New Online Tool to Prepare Global Workforce for Future of Work

Preparing professionals for the future of work

Harmonics Group, an indigenous Irish firm and lead member of OI Global Partners (one of the world’s largest career consulting partnerships), has launched a dynamic online research tool to measure how prepared individuals are for the future of work.

With the rise of AI and automation leading to new ways of working, Harmonics developed the Future Career Readiness Index to help busy working professionals to take stock and anticipate the critical skills they will need for future career success.

The impact of technology is bringing a lot of uncertainty and change to the global workforce. And, according to Harmonics who have been researching this area for a number of years, the greatest amount of change ever in corporate history will be experienced in the next five years.

John Fitzgerald, managing director of Harmonics Group, said “There has been a lot of scare-mongering about the ‘robots are coming’ in recent years. And it’s true, it is estimated that by 2025, more than half of all workplace tasks will be carried out by machines. But there is very little practical career advice available on how to prepare for these changes.”

The Future Career Readiness Index is designed for working professionals at any stage of their career; it’s free and takes just 10 minutes to complete online. The results are presented in a comprehensive downloadable report which identifies an individual’s key areas for development and includes 20 powerful career coaching questions to help them accelerate their future career.

The methodology behind the Index is based on the ‘Future of Work Globe’, a model created by Harmonics Group from their work with over 20,000 people.  The Future of Work Globe illustrates the dynamic and evolving nature of work. It takes a 3-dimensional perspective and looks at the internal drivers (personal and professional development), the changing needs of organisations (internal market) and the rapidly changing world of work (external environment). The 20 statements presented in the Index are designed to score individuals on the 5 areas of most importance to their future career success.

“It is estimated that 75 million jobs worldwide will be lost in the next five years, but 133 million new roles will also be created. There will be winners and losers across all levels and professions. Every week I meet people who are too busy and focused on their current job to plan for their future career.  They need to change before they become a victim of change,” he continued.

“The skills to succeed in the future are very different to what were required just three years ago. We can’t compete against smart machines, but we can learn to work side by side and hone our unique human skills to advance. We also need to develop a growth mindset, just like leading sports professionals, so that we can adapt to new ways of working and be at our best,” said Mr Fitzgerald.

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Global Survey Reveals Skills in Demand & Roles at Risk

Global Talent Management Survey Highlights Leadership and Workforce Challenges

Harmonics, the Irish partner of OI Global Partners (one of the world’s largest career consulting partnerships), has released the results of its third annual proprietary survey of global leaders from the 28 countries in which OIGP operates. Talent managers and HR professionals representing over 1,000 organizations — more than double last year’s response rate — were from a range of industries led by Financial Services and Technology followed by Manufacturing, Nonprofits, Hospitals & Healthcare, and Education.

The goals of the survey were to understand the following:

  1. the skills employees must have to be competitive today;
  2. the most significant people challenges currently facing organizations;
  3. the most effective ways to develop talent; and
  4. the roles most at risk.

Almost 10% of the respondents were from Ireland.

John Fitzgerald, managing director of Harmonics, said “The results show that in every part of the world, organizations share common challenges and risks and they have found a variety of solutions to manage the evolving work landscape – some which may be more effective than others.”

Among the key findings of the survey, respondents indicated that the top two skills employees must have to be competitive are: 1) leadership agility: the ability to take effective action in complex, rapidly-changing conditions; and 2) coordinating with others: the ability to collaborate, especially in changing environments.

John Fitzgerald noted, “There is a direct correlation between the number one most valued skill and one of the key people challenges that organisations are facing – adapting to change. The speed of change in the global economy means employers are almost always in a restructuring and change mode. Every organisation now wants agile people as they are more likely to adapt to change.”

Recruitment is the most critical concern of talent managers today with most of them saying that attracting and hiring new talent is their biggest challenge. “We are very much still in an employee driven marketplace. There is quite simply a global scarcity of specialized talent. From our experience, an organisation’s employer value proposition (EVP) needs to promise more than extrinsic rewards. Companies who align their EVP to the organisations purpose will have a competitive advantage in the race for talent,” noted Mr Fitzgerald.

Half of talent managers say that adapting to change significantly challenges their organisations, making it the second most frequently indicated human resources issue after recruitment, followed by managers lacking coaching skills. Once on board, retaining and engaging employees become paramount.

“The same five people challenges have occupied the attention of organisations each year we have conducted this survey; they have just traded places, so there is a high level of consistency” commented Mr. Fitzgerald.

Leadership development programmes are seen as the number one most effective talent development followed by annualized personal development reviews and assessments ranking second and third.

“The popularity of annualized personal development reviews and assessments surprised us because our experience indicates that these are not effective talent management activities. We believe this high response relates to the lack of time managers have to coach their people. Employees need regular development conversations and assessments need to be linked to an OD strategy to be effective. Training managers as coaches and one-to-one executive coaching can be much more effective interventions,” commented Mr. Fitzgerald.

The roles most at risk are:

  1. finance and accounting roles, which moved up dramatically in the ranking;
  2. administrative and support staff, in keeping with 2017’s results;
  3. managerial roles, especially middle management as Organisations become flatter and less hierarchical.

“The decline of routine repetitive work continues apace as a result of automation and AI. This is hitting both high and low skill occupations. An eagerness to learn and indeed relearn has never been more necessary for those whose roles are at risk,” said Mr. Fitzgerald.

In conclusion, Mr Fitzgerald said, “These survey results highlight the need for both employers and employees to stay agile, continuously adapt to change and demonstrate an eagerness to learn for life to stay competitive.”