Talking Talent

What sort of workforce will Australia need in the future?

Some issues I see on the horizon include the retirement of baby boomers and the potential clash between ‘digital natives’ (the current generation of teenagers often called Y Genners, that has grown up immersed in technology) and ‘digital immigrants’ (most of the current workers - Baby Boomers and early X Genners) who are adapting to new technologies but whose pivotal education and development has not been heavily influenced by technology.

Y Generation workers’ continuous exposure to technology will make them more impatient ‘job hoppers’, and the compensation is that they are likely to be more creative than their predecessors.

This will have interesting implications for the public sector, where, in most cases, technological change will continue to occur more slowly than in the private sector because of more regulatory constraints and greater risk aversion.

I think that the traditionally long tenures of civil servants will keep shrinking, which means that government agencies will need to come to terms with a more ‘volatile’ workforce. Although external service providers can help, government agencies will need to retain critical skills in-house, and the faster employee turnover among suppliers will not make things any easier.

And of course this technology literate group will be in management positions (at the middle and top levels) by 2020, and not just in IT departments (or whichever areas will manage IT by then).

However, will government be able to retain the most talented people, or will these individuals be so disappointed by the earlier part of their careers marked by low-tech environments and a lack of flexibility to abandon government and leave the public sector with a much greater skill shortage challenge than it faces today?

Moreover, will this force government to outsource critical processes to a much greater degree than we can envisage today?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under intergen workforce.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.