The Skills Most Likely To Be In Demand

The Skills Most Likely To Be In Demand

by Charles Hugh Smith, contributing editor

Monday, November 28, 2011

Executive Summary

• The New Paradigm For Job Security
• Unlocking Value By Removing Systemic ‘Friction’
• Examples of Promising Business Models
• The Skills That Will Be In High Demand
• Why Changing Your Behavior Will Be as Important as Re-Skilling

Part I: The Future Of Jobs

If you have not yet read Part I, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Part II: The Skills Most Likely To Be In Demand

The New Paradigm for Job Security

The coming decade will turn many long-standing ideas about work and employment on their heads.

For example, in the current Status Quo, inflexibility and resistance to change are the hallmarks of secure employment. Institutional employment is “guaranteed” by contracts, and institutional resistance to change is viewed as a guarantee of secure employment.

In the near future, these brittle forms of security will prove chimerical, as the very rigidity and resistance to change that characterizes institutions renders them increasingly prone to disruption and collapse. The very traits which are currently viewed as protectors of security will be revealed as the causes of insecurity. Flexibility and adaptability—what are now viewed as hallmarks of insecurity—will slowly be recognized as the sources of real security. These include flex-time, free-lance labor, small, local enterprises and self-organizing networks.

The more an institution is isolated from the risks of adaptation, experimentation, transparency and low-intensity volatility, the more fractal and chaotic its eventual disruption will prove. The more risk that an enterprise is exposed to on a daily basis—that is, low-intensity volatility and fluctuation that reflects transparency and experimentation, the more stable and secure it will be.

Removing Friction

It is no coincidence that rigid, opaque, distanced-from-risk institutions are high-cost as their cost is based on friction. As a result, their pricing is “sticky” and resistant to market forces. It is also no coincidence that low-cost enterprises are flexible, exposed to risk and transparent in their adaptability and flow of information.

Value can be extracted by using disruptive technologies and open-source organization to replace high-cost systems with lower cost systems and distributing the gains among the entrepreneurs, suppliers and customers.