Conclusions

Soaring numbers of graduates mean that job seeking will change forever. Older workers will hold the aces like never before, and sandwich-generation workers will create entirely new working patterns.

The task of managing people in a more flexible environment will become wholly more difficult in 2020. It will require a skill set that, in most cases, doesn’t exist now.

For graduates, strange though it may seem, they will be motivated to work in traditional and not-so-flexible ways. With student debt a problem, we expect this group to be eager to advance – a more ambitious breed of graduates. The difficulties they will find entering the job market, however, mean they will apply a whole new level of enterprise and innovation to the job seeking process.

Faced with a squeeze on both their money and their time, the sandwich generation will require sympathetic employers. The relative shortage of skilled labour and the appreciating value of experience will be their levers to force a more flexible approach from employers.

The problem of an ageing society has benefits for older workers. The prejudice that surrounds this group will not disappear entirely but the value of experience has been highlighted by the recession and will lead to more power than ever before within this group, as knowledge and corporate memory become key.

Another major issue is the riddle over flexible working. Demographic changes and the extension of the sandwich generation will force employers to offer greater flexibility in order to retain elite workers.

However, home working provokes unintended consequences. Principal among these is that when we’re removed from the workplace and our colleagues, we remain individuals with a lesser sense of belonging to an organisation. This means the slow death of the company man.

Future workers may feel themselves to be freelancers more than company people. It’s much harder to express a company culture and to share goals when workers are geographically spread. It’s also harder to exchange knowledge. Home working goes against the benefits of people working in teams and it may not be too strong to suggest that flexible working damages the knowledge economy.

While flexible hours offer some relief to parents and carers, flexible working is not a solution for all – many of us would rather trade flexibility for more pay while for others it means exclusion, a lower profile and being cut off from the very human interactions that will create the ideas for the knowledge economy.

In 2020 people management will be a much more demanding task –in measurement, in motivation and in maintaining a sense of what the organisation is.

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