After the tragedy, if there is one thing the pandemic has given us it is a vision of the future: increasing levels of digital—potentially remote—working and more automation. On the horizon is a world of advanced technology and a demand for future skills and new ways of working. Artificial intelligence, big data and robotics all offer the prospect of dramatic change to our working lives. We knew that, but Covid-19 has perhaps given us a fresh view of startling clarity.

For Deanna Mulligan, former chief executive and chair of Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, it is a perspective that should not be ignored. Her new book, Hire Purpose: How Smart Companies Can Close the Skills Gap, aims to tackle the problem of future skills head on. And corporate leaders should give the topic urgent attention.

“The future is here, in terms of a hyper-connected-via-technology environment for both consumers and employees,” she says. “There’s so many large-scale projects going on inside companies today that there aren’t enough people trained in how to deal with change, how to help people adjust, and help people learn new skills.”

Mulligan is not the only one who believes the skills needed for the future are a pressing problem.

A report from McKinsey, the management consultancy, says 75 million to 375 million people around the world may need to change occupations and learn new skills by 2030.

“The shift could be on a scale not seen since the transition of the labor force out of agriculture in the early 1900s in the United States and Europe, and more recently in in China,” the report says. Close to one in ten new jobs could be ones that have never existed before, the report adds.

Another McKinsey report says a quarter of the workforce in advanced economies could be working from home three to five days a week. Executives have said on average they will reduce office space by 30%. The pandemic has also caused e-commerce to grow two to five times faster, depending on which country you’re in.

Lifelong learning

Covid-19 has offered many lessons about the future of business and work, says Mulligan. “One of the things we learned is that companies can be much more flexible and adaptable than perhaps they have been in the past or thought they would be.” She adds: “And we saw employees learning new skills on the fly.”

Mulligan offers a skills prescription that is wide ranging, but potentially profound, based upon adoption of lifelong learning as a facet of a company’s “purpose”.

She says companies should be taking “responsibility” for lifelong learning, employees will need to accept they will likely face retraining and should be more “entrepreneurial” in their outlook. “In this crisis it’s really the frontline employees who have invented lots of new and different ways of doing things in order to make sure their companies delivered,” Mulligan says.

Governments too have a role to play reviewing state provision for reskilling and retraining. But Mulligan places lifelong learning at the heart of a company’s societal purpose. At Guardian, she worked to connect employees with customers who had experienced the benefits of company services. The town hall meetings and get togethers where they met emphasised the employees’ role in wider society.

“We spent a lot of time at Guardian making sure people in the company knew how their jobs were contributing to the wellbeing of our policyholders,” she says.

She also lived the lifelong learning ethos while at Guardian, at one point putting all staff through the Agile model of software development to help manage an upgrade to company systems. This helped everyone understand what the project was about.

“We are going to have to learn to work in new ways and sometimes existing hierarchies or org charts don’t particularly fit the task to be done,” says Mulligan, “and we need to collaborate across functions and across business units. So that’s why we trained everyone in the Agile way of working,” she says.

Future leadership skills

It’s not just employees who will need to address their skills base. So too will leaders. Indeed, confronted by a new world of technology, the workplace will demand leadership more focused on collaborative working with their teams. This is key to balancing the process of change alongside the day-to-day problems of running of companies, says Mulligan.

“This is much more of a team-based learning problem than it is a top down leaders tell employees what to do problem. And, you know, let’s face it, we’re not really always very good at solving those kinds of problems. And so everybody needs to learn a new skill set. It’s not just employees, it’s managers, leaders, CEOs as well,” says Mulligan.

Despite the challenges, Mulligan is optimistic companies, governments and above all else, employees can deal with what’s coming, even though it might be painful. Some jobs will undoubtedly disappear altogether, she says.

“I hate to keep going back to the current crisis situation we’re in but we have been able to adapt. We’ve fumbled around, we’ve made some mistakes. Unfortunately, many people are unemployed, and we hope we can employ them again soon.

“But we are moving forward. And we are continuing to function as a society in really dire conditions we hadn’t really anticipated.

“And the reason we’ve been able to do that is because companies have been able to adapt and I think as this crisis, hopefully subsides, we will be able to use those skills to really attack this skill gap.”