By Gabriela Vlasich for staffingamericalatina.

During the World Employment Conference 2018, held in Dublin, Ireland, we had the opportunity to interview seven experts on topics such as the future of work, education, skills and workers 4.0.

This is the second of a series of interviews, where experts share their opinions on these areas. On this occassion, we interviewed John Healy, Vice-President and Managing Director at Kelly Services. You can follow him on Twitter at @unclejunkmuses .

What do you expect the labor market to be like by 2025?

I think we are going to continue to see, across different geographies a migration where the workers will get more control on their choices, especially in the educated levels, that the supply demand equation is saying there is not enough supply and there is more demand; which means that the workers are going to have control in making decisions. So, whether that’s to choose to work from home, to work as a full time employee, to work as a gig worker, to work as a contractor, they will have more flexibility there.

At the same time, for the lower end of the spectrum, there is going to need to be some reform around education and skills re-training. Because that’s a population that just cannot be left behind, we need those people to be brought up into the working community.

What do you think education will be like by 2025?

Education is going to change. There is an event that is put on a state university, plus GSV (Global Silicon Valley). I think they do one of the best jobs at bringing together the education space, the enterprise space, and the venture capital space. There is an increasing amount of investment from private money going into the education space, as this is because many large corporations, as employee loyalty started coming down, so there is more turnover, slowed down on their investment in learning and development. So, it became kind of an endless drain cycle going down, where individuals aren’t getting the training, companies aren’t investing in it.

So, the big question is whose responsibility it is. And it’s wonderful to say, well, everyone should be focusing on life-long learning, and I will go out a do my own. But not everyone is going to be motivated or economically able to do it on their own. So I think you will see more private education that is coming out that are making things available, but I think that the government and policies are going to have to address skills training, and making sure that that is a right that people have access to.

What do you think are the most significant skills’ gaps and what can be done to overcome them?

I don’t think there is a skills gap. If you look at the data, the jobs that are most difficult to fill today, the skills that are hardest to find, and then you go back five years, you ask that same question, you go back another five, and another five, the amount of time it takes to fill each of those jobs hasn’t changed. New skills are always difficult to find. So, the question that I think we have to start asking is more about location. If the skills exist in one market, do I have the flexibility to go use the talent in that market? That’s what technology has given us.

So I see more organizations acknowledging I have a gap in my geography, the skills are not in this city, but they exist over there. And over there can be a different country, it can be a different city, it can be a different state. And I think we have to get more creative about how we can get work done than just relying on: there is just a skills gap.

Does that mean that the company will out to where talent is?

Or allow for remote work. There is some work that can be moved to talent, there is other work that can’t be moved. I can’t move my refinery, so I need to bring talent into that, but my IT work? I can move it. So I think it’s the trade’s position, the work that can’t be moved, those are the things that concern me more about developing the capabilities and competences in local markets.

As regards the impact of technology, what must be done to generate workers 4.0?

Everyone talks about the future of work. We are here. Yesterday, the future was today. I think that we are living in the future of work, the technology skills that we all have to have right now, you are recording me. People think about physical robots, but Siri or Alexa, all the different tools are out there. I think it is a question about how we engage. I think massive change is going to come about, and I have to give credit to Andrew McAfee, Machine Platform Crowd is the book that he covers this in, and he speaks about that during the 1^st Industrial Revolution, when we moved from steam to electricity, the first adopters replaced their steam engine with an electric motor. They didn’t gain any efficiency, as a business. It was the same thing happening. It wasn’t until they realized they could distribute the electricity into different places and change the way work was getting done that the factory became efficient.

I believe we have to think the same way. Right now, a lot of people are replacing an individual activity with a single technology. So they are just replacing the steam engine with an electric motor. We have to think about how we change the way things get done, for technology to truly change the way we gain productivity, how we live differently. Think about you use technology as a human being and as a consumer. Do you do the same as a worker?

Well, basically I do.

That’s good! So it comes more into your human life, instead of your professional life. I think those lines get blurred and you become far more accepting.