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y 2030, up to 30% of the hours worked globally could be automated, according to a new report by the McKinsey Global Institute. Analysts in the consultancy’s research arm estimate that between 400 million and 800 million people could find themselves displaced by automation and in need of new jobs, depending on how quickly new technologies are adopted. Of this group, as many as 375 million people—about 14% of the global workforce—may need to completely switch occupational categories and learn a new set of skills to find work.

Notably, McKinsey argues that demand for work will increase as automation grows. Technology will drive productivity growth, which will in turn lead to rising incomes and consumption, especially in developing countries. Meanwhile, there will be more jobs in health care to meet the demands of aging societies and more investment in infrastructure and energy.

For these benefits to be realised, everyone needs to gain new skills, with governments and private companies taking on the unprecedented task of retraining millions of people in the middle of their careers. “Even if there is enough work to ensure full employment by 2030, major transitions lie ahead that could match or even exceed the scale of historical shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing,” the report says.

Pfizer, for example, has set "increase business agility" as one of its four goals for the coming year. The company created an internal labor marketplace called PfizerWorks that lets employees bid on work from each other. Executives at Siemens told me that one of their biggest challenges today is moving engineers into new roles so they can focus on new business areas. InBev (Anheuser Busch), Scotiabank, and MetLife have all launched global talent mobility programs to force people to gain global awareness and expand business opportunities.

In our research we call this "the borderless workplace," a concept which explains how workers work seamlessly with people inside and outside their organization on a continuous basis. And this shift has redefined what a “job” actually is.

What this all means is that in today's high performing companies, people now take on "roles" not "jobs." They are responsible for "tasks" and "projects" and not simply "functions."

“There are five hiring attributes we have across the company,” explained Bock. “If it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive.”

The second, he added, “is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership.

What else? Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. “Your end goal,” explained Bock, “is what can we do together to problem-solve.

The hierarchical organizational structure is outdated. Those outside the organization, including employees after work, have more connections and better access to knowledge than inside. Traditionally, companies have been users of human capital, demanding all intellectual property for themselves. But networks can empower individuals, building upon the strengths of each member. The innovators are moving away from companies and into networks already. Today, most new companies are hiring fewer employees and many existing companies are shedding employees at every opportunity. The newly unemployed often realize their professional networks outside the organization are inadequate. The industrial era social contract between capital and labour is broken. Workers are starting to get more professional value from their social networks than from their companies, especially through open knowledge-sharing.

Et pour optimiser au mieux les investissements de l’entreprise, le fabricant de pneumatiques s’est avant tout appuyé sur une révision approfondie des compétences véritablement nécessaires pour chaque poste. Il a également développé un mix de méthodes pour notamment “apprendre en créant” alliant ainsi campus, tutorat et self-learning, l’apprentissage par soi-même. Enfin, choix a été fait de renforcer le dispositif de validation et de qualification. Concrètement, 400 000 heures de gains ont été identifiées. Et 240 000 ont déjà été concrétisées en 2013.

Et d'autant que les données LinkedIn serviront, notamment, à améliorer les technos et applications "d'intelligence artificielle" (Deep Learning) de Microsoft. On peut donc aisément imaginer dans un futur proche des scénarios assez triviaux où le dialogue avec cette "IA" s'enrichira d'un nouvel horizon dialogique qui lui permettra de vous signaler différents événements professionnels et de vous faire toute une série de propositions de mutation, de nouveaux contacts, etc., mais également des scénarios plus "élaborés" dans lesquels ce même assistant intelligent piloté par une IA gèrera en temps-réel la totalité de votre "carrière"

Cerise sur la gâteau, en complément des avantages que confère de facto cette acquisition à Microsoft, elle est également le cheval de Troie idéal lui permettant d'établir un pont avec les politiques publiques (ou privées) de formation : la plupart des néo-inscrits sur LinkedIn le sont dès leurs études universitaires. Je vous laisse alors imaginer ce monde dans lequel, en plus des accords passés avec Cisco (et avec Microsoft) par le ministère de l'éducation nationale, le même Microsoft (et ses partenaires privés) auront alors la capacité de réguler les choix d'étude et de formation professionnelle de la plupart des futurs travailleurs.

La "valeur" de la base LinkedIn est liée à trois facteurs essentiels. D'abord sa volumétrie : il s'agit du site rassemblant le plus d'informations sur le plus grand nombre de travailleurs sur la planète (400 millions d'utilisateurs). Ensuite son positionnement : c'est le site leader sur le secteur de l'employabilité et de la mobilité professionnelle. Enfin sa dimension "relationnelle", au sens premier et informatique de ce que l'on appelle une "base de donnée relationnelle", c'est à dire la capacité d'offrir différents niveaux de navigation, de croisement et d'analyse parmi l'ensemble des données structurées présentes dans la base.

Even if new jobs and wonderful products emerge, in the short term income gaps will widen, causing huge social dislocation and perhaps even changing politics. Technology’s impact will feel like a tornado, hitting the rich world first, but eventually sweeping through poorer countries too. No government is prepared for it.

Worse, it seems likely that this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started. From driverless cars to clever household gadgets (see article), innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too.

One recent study by academics at Oxford University suggests that 47% of today’s jobs could be automated in the next two decades.

Not everyone is convinced that the growing use of technology to monitor workers’ productivity offers an un­equivocal improvement, however. Teresa Amabile, a professor and director of research at Harvard Business School, says it could be “very positive” or “very negative” depending on the existing workplace culture. Monitoring can work if the teams, departments or whole offices using the software or devices have what she calls “a high degree of psychological safety”. If people feel able to experiment, potentially fail and learn from those lessons, then they can be motivated by gaining a better understanding of how they spend their days. But she warned that the technology was still in its early days and could be “too crude” an instrument to rely on. “There is definitely a danger of seeing technology as a silver bullet,” she says.