In the last decades many professions just died, merged with others, changed and nobody really cared. Like in printing, steno typist, mechanics. In the 70ies workers ran against machines and the dooming automatisation, but their rage was compensated by unstoppable technological progress. Companies just moved away. The dark decade of mass unemployment began.

What happens now in the course of digitization?

Economist Keynes’s is quoted on his prediction of widespread technological unemployment “due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour”. So the mass of people will be out of work, at least in the USA as Carl Frey and Michael Osborne put it in 2013. Not so in Germany as the Federal Institute of Vocational Education (BIBB) proved. The demand of skill sets and the character of the labour market will change. The results show that economy 4.0 will accelerate the structural change towards more services. In this process labour force movements between branches, occupations and job requirements are much larger than the change of the number of employees in total.

How is our working world changing?

The world economy prospering for the northern hemisphere. Another decade begins - with the lack of skilled work force.  Everybody wants to manage, heading towards university with a clean, white shirt, but who is going to work and can work at all? As the skill set that you have to offer, needs to be a really complex one: ICT, analysis and error diagnostics, languages, programming, soft skills, problem solving, team player. Digitisation can help. How about working with 3 D printing, augmented reality, safe guarding big data and finding you robot buddy in the workshop that never sleeps? Let us have a conversation on this. Join the panel discussion with our experts from Germany, Israel, Russia and the USA.