Will you find a job when you graduate?

I wrote this note primarily for my students at Rotterdam Business School …

One of the major concerns of students and employees is – will the Digital Economy mean less jobs to go around? This fear is compounded in the west by the export of many jobs to lower-wage countries – globalization.

This is a natural concern when looking at recent headlines:

“RBS moves 443 jobs to Mumbai from the UK”
“Mothercare looks to halve the number of stores”
“Will the rise of AI terminate our jobs?”

Even in some of the lower-wage cost countries, jobs are being lost. IBM India recently announced that at least 5,000 jobs might go – and an IBM spokesperson explained: “re-skilling and rebalancing is an ongoing process as we accelerate the benefits of cognitive and cloud technologies for clients around the world”.

The optimist suggests that (as predicted by John Maynard Keynes) that our problem is going to be how to fill the leisure time that is going to be created by day-today jobs being filled by robots of one kind or another. Indeed, Warren Buffett praises companies that reduce staffing levels: “They have followed the standard capitalist formula … of trying to do the same business with fewer people. People live better when there is more output per capita.” But are we living better? The pessimist points out that despite the rise in digitalization and use of robots most people are still working as hard as ever. The realist in me suggests that if everyone is going to benefit from digitalization, artificial intelligence, robotization, etc. – then we are going to need a radical change in how society functions

In the meantime, what are we (and you) going to do? One point of view suggest that in the future we will all be entrepreneurs – that will require new skills and capabilities, particularly creativity.

Perhaps the news from Infosys in India shows the way for those of you who don’t have an entrepreneurial bent. While annual hiring of full-time staff in Infosys India will be lowered to around 6,000 new employees in 2016-17. At the same time 11,000 employees had been moved from manual repetitive tasks and redeveloped them to positions requiring creativity and imagination. Infosys further claims it has retrained 140,000 of its 200,000 staff since 2014 – resulting in higher productivity, more creative positions. So clearly being able to develop new skills helps those at Infosys keep their jobs.

Have business schools kept up with changes? In a 2014 blog, “Business Schools have lost a staggering amount of credibility in the business community” two London School of Economics lecturers assert that many business schools have failed to develop curricula that satisfy the needs of employers who require a workforce that can evolve alongside a continuously changing world.” They point out that what businesses seek is: problem-solving, the ability to connect different aspects of business and think in a holistic way, and the courage to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity.

So – what skills and capabilities are you going to learn while you study for your business degree – that will prepare you for the world of tomorrow? Do you know how to learn and keep learning?

In the RBS Graduate Department we are evolving to help you with courses such as Critical Thinking (creative problem-solving) and giving you assignments such as those in International Project and Managing Corporate Sustainability that take you out of your comfort zone forcing you to work with people of different cultures with different ways of thinking and working.

We live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous). To survive we are going to need to be creative and imaginative. Is your degree helping you prepare?