Assessment's role in future-proofing your business

When the Wright Brothers made the first powered flight in December 1903, few can have imagined they were witnessing the birth of a new industrial era. The flight lasted only 12 seconds and never got more than 10 feet off the ground. And yet, less than 15 years later, the British Government was able to form the Royal Air Force, with 20,000 advanced aircraft and 300,000 staff.

The technological landscape of the future is, arguably, even harder to predict today than it would have been for those present at that first inauspicious flight. While rapid technological development itself is nothing new, the transformation we are currently going through is of unprecedented scope, with virtually no sector untouched by digitisation and almost all companies having to adjust their strategies in order to survive the “Fourth Industrial Age”. Even law firms have begun using artificial intelligence to interrogate dense legal databases and find solutions to cases faster than a human mind could do.

Experts predict that the scale of these changes will have major implications for how all of us live and work in the future. According to the World Economic Forum, 30% of jobs will disappear by 2025 while the US Department of Labor predicts that 65% of today’s schoolchildren will ultimately be employed in jobs that have yet to be invented.

Evidently, these changes will also have an impact on the strategies organisations adopt for recruiting talent. The fact that business requirements are evolving at an ever-increasing pace means that HR teams will have to ask themselves urgent questions about who they hire and how. What role will people play in our organisation in the future? What skillsets are we currently missing? How can we upskill our existing teams? Who do we need to bring in from outside the organisation in order to future-proof our business?