Accelerating your HR career in a robotic world

With so much focus on AI, automation and robotics and the impact on the workplace, less attention can be paid to the critical role that the humanities and social sciences will play in shaping how we work.

For the HR professional, this creates exciting opportunities as more than ever workplaces will need experts who understand people, are able to create connections and generate behavioural insights.

In 2017, when the McKinsey Global Institute examined the workforce impacts of automation they found that based on current available technology about 60 percent of occupations have at least 30 percent of activities that could be automated. Significantly, the impact was less for people in roles that required human to human interaction.

Disrupt yourself

Careers, these days, are fluid, flexible, organic and adaptive - they take a degree of reinvention. This means that the HR professional needs to be forward thinking, ready to continuously learn and be prepared to go beyond what's traditionally expected of HR functions.

As Salim Ismail, the author of Exponential Organisations, said: "Today, if you're not disrupting yourself, someone else is; your fate is to be either the disrupter or the disrupted. There is no middle ground".

Whilst his comments were referencing organisations, the same can be said for a person's career and the work they do. The HR professional's role has evolved through time, and this will continue.

It is no longer enough to just know the traditional HR disciplines. Instead the future is about embracing the notion of being a polymath. That is, a person with a broad range of knowledge.

For the HR professional, this may include disciplines such as:

• Agile
• Project management
• Change management
• Process improvement including lean and six sigma
• Behavioural economics
• Design thinking

This broad-based learning will be critical as it provides the opportunity for the HR professional to broaden into connected disciplines.

Check your career fitness

To get ready for the future the HR professional needs to understand how fit their career is.

Assessing your career periodically helps you determine whether you are in a rut or holding on to an unrealistic, outdated view of your career.

It also challenges you to think about what may need to shift and what you may need to do more or less of to ensure a successful, sustainable and rewarding career.

As part of this process, the HR professional can look at potential future scenarios to investigate and identify potential changes and risks, in light of where the workplace and their industry is heading.

This approach, which can be likened to the scenario planning that an organisation may undertake as part of its strategic planning, helps to map an appropriate course of action.

For example, PwC outlined four potential future of work scenarios based on the way people and organisations focus on collective or individual needs and gain, and operate in an integrated or fragmented manner.

Using such scenarios or others, the HR professional can look ahead and examine where their industry and occupation is heading, and how far they need to pivot and adapt their current skills base and expertise, and whether it's time for them to leap into a new direction.

Ditch the expectations

Expectations shape the choices that people make. There are expectations about the HR professional's typical career path, the skills they bring and therefore the options they pursue for career progression.

Breaking out of this mould of expectations isn't easy, because it can be an internal debate between what you 'could' do and what you 'should' do. The 'could' being something that is unexpected, challenging, risky or slightly left of centre. While the 'should' being the job that people expect you to do, or the job that your beliefs limit you too.

To ditch the expectations and any unhelpful internal dialogue, ask yourself:

• What are the rules (both written and unwritten) I've been told about my career and career change?
• Which of those have held me back?
• Which ones have propelled me forward?
• Which ones are no longer relevant?
• Which rules am I prepared to ditch?
• Are there new rules I need to create to help me leap into a new career and stay professionally relevant?

Career success is never the result of one decision, one event or one outcome. It's the culmination of the steps - some big and some small - that the HR professional takes every single day.

As the French biologist, microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur, said: "Chance favours only the prepared mind".

References available on request.

Michelle Gibbings is a change leadership and career expert and founder of Change Meridian. Michelle works with leaders and teams to help them get fit for the future of work. She is the Author of 'Step Up: How to Build Your Influence at Work' and 'Career Leap: How to Reinvent and Liberate your Career'. For more information: www.michellegibbings.com or contact [email protected].

Pullquote:

The future is about embracing the notion of having a broad range of knowledge