HRD sat down with a chief psychology officer about the skills required for the future of work
For HR professionals, pondering the future of work is an ongoing project. From a lay perspective it’s often a question of which industries hold promising horizons. But there are far wider implications. For Dr Matthew Neale, Chief Psychology Officer at Revelian, the future of work also has a profound influence on future hiring and recruitment practices.
“I think people tend to conflate this idea of the ‘future of work’ with ‘more technology in the office’,” says Neale. “Certainly that’s one element - 2 out of the 10 skills for the future identified by the World Economic Forum directly relate to technical prowess - but it’s also important to consider the sort of roles that might develop, and the sort of personal qualities and skills that employers are going to be looking for.”
Dr Neale points to the recent release of the Future of Jobs report from the World Economic Forum. According to its findings, the top 15 skills required in the workplace by 2020 are as follows:
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active learning and listening strategies
- Complex problem-solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Creativity, originality and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Technology use, monitoring and control
- Technology design and programming
- Resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility
- Reasoning, problem-solving and ideation
- Emotional intelligence
- Troubleshooting and user experience
- Service orientation
- Systems analysis and evaluation
- Persuasion and negotiation
“I don’t think that any of these skills are especially novel or shocking, particularly if you’ve been in the recruitment space for a while,” says Dr Neale. “But I do think we’re going to see the emphasis on each of them increasing over the next few years. And you can see some common traits underpinning several – how a candidate’s emotional intelligence can influence judgement and decision making, for example.”
The question then shifts to how HR professionals can be aware of the best ways to recruit for these talents – or, indeed, look more closely at the likely ability of their current staff to adapt to the future of work.
It’s a multifaceted question, Dr Neale acknowledges.
“I don’t think we’re going to see the traditional face-to-face – or at the moment, video – style of interview ever totally disappear,” says Neale. “There’s lots of things you can learn about a person when you meet them in real life that can’t necessarily be conveyed on a resume. But I do think we’ll see businesses investing into a variety of skill assessments and psychometric testing.”
If you’ve got access to tools that provide an in-depth assessment of the characteristics that underlie and influence behaviour, explains Neale, then you’ll be able to gain a keener insight into whether the candidate’s skills line up with the company’s stated needs – and in turn, whether they’re a good fit for the organization.
“We’ve got evidence that cognitive ability assessments become even more predictive of future work performance as roles become more complex and have greater information processing requirements,” says Neale. “So when you combine that with other assessments, you can really start to build a complete picture of the candidate, and whether they’re going to be a good hire for now and into the future.”
Looking ahead, he is philosophical about the prospective changes facing the workplace as it exists today. Though the means of delivery may shift, spokesperson notes, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a company’s core goals need to. Dr Neale points to Revelian itself as an example.
“I think one of the most exciting things about the future of work is that it’s going to look quite different from company to company,” he says. “We’re in the business of helping employers identify people with the skills they need to drive their business into the future. How we do that might change, but the goal itself remains constant.”
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