We should be closely monitoring the emerging workplace, especially for individuals who have just entered in the past few years, as well as those who will be entering in the next few years.
A chorus of two specific dynamics are in play.
The incorporation of AI and the insistence that a large percentage of new entrants into the workplace prefer to work from home rather than return to the hub of where career pathways are determined and on the job lessons are learned.
It could create a professional workplace challenge which will lead to societal tensions.
Technology is trending to change the way we work and will put pressure on existing business models.
Generative AI could start reducing the lower-level operating functions which over-indexes towards new graduates. AI tools sift through large data sets more efficiently than humans. As they enter the workforce, early career individuals are usually the data grinders.
Nearly all organizations would like less “people” issues. Adjustments have been underway to balance out a period of over hiring, overcompensating, and economic-centric retention bonuses in 2020 into 2021.
Large and small companies are doing more with less full time employees. Earlier stage companies are trending towards being virtual, co-sourcing functions like regulatory, clinical, advanced manufacturing, and HR, as well as other operational activities.
It is moving up the value-chain and we are already seeing classic sales, customer service, as well as software coding, being reduced with the use of AI tools.
The least experienced, the weakest, are the first to die off.
The earlier career entrants seem to be more interested in working remotely or hybrid and reject the in-office trends that are requesting them to return to the workplace.
They are not helping themselves.
Missing mentoring experiences.
Missing the opportunity to impress those who decide promotions and early career trajectories. Which in turn, determine where one will be in 3, 10, 20 years from now.
There is a Darwinian nature to this and being on the wrong end of evolution can be brutal.
In a workplace, there strives to be a hierarchy of competency. The higher up the hierarchy, generally the increased likelihood of stability and security.
When a hierarchy gets stressed, the most exposed and least experienced get compromised.
Then what?
