Robot as a Colleague? No Fear of Job Loss. Simone Janson

in the expert panel Dr. Ursula Engelen-Kefer, former chairman of the German Trade Union Confederation and lecturer at the University of the Federal Employment Agency, Dr. Agnes Dietzen of the Department of Competence Development at the Federal Institute for Vocational Training, and Dr. Stephan Pfisterer, Head of Educational Policy and Labor Market at BITKOM.

      Under the moderation of Dr. Sonja Mönkedieck, Fellow of the foundation of new responsibility, we discussed the pros and cons of competence-based work, as many digital workers already live today, compared to traditional, clear job profiles with fixed training structures.

      The difficulty with new job titles

      Here, people who change their jobs often and autodidactically continue to look, yes gladly looked at, because they still fall through the rendezvous - I have already written here. Classic career paths also raise a number of problems, which is probably familiar to anyone who has already been looking for a job.

      For the popular method of entering a search term in the job market of choice and then having the appropriate result spat out, may indeed be practical - but falls short. As a rule, many job seekers do not find the jobs that suit their skills, because it is often hard to guess what the job is that fits their qualifications.

      What are companies looking for?

      Some time ago I came up with a nice example: someone was looking for someone to do organizational tasks for the management in the office, actually a kind of girl for everything. In the past, in times of classic professions, one would probably have said secretary. Today, however, you should also take care of Twitter, Facebook, Xing etc.

      So, was the job advertised as a social media manager? Or with one of the more traditional names: Assistant to the management, project manager, project coordinator, personnel personnel or accounting? No. Since it is a non-profit organization and the person sought should also coordinate donation collecting, the place was advertised as a fundraiser. Honestly: Who would have come to it?

      85% want better job findability

      According to a survey carried out by the job exchange job advertisements.de, 85% of the interviewed applicants want jobs to be easier to find. Again and again, a clearer language as well as more precise task descriptions and requirement profiles were mentioned among the suggestions for improvement. This is difficult because, due to technical progress, the areas of responsibility are changing faster than job titles or training and further education.

      I remember that Professor a Hamburg university that trained journalists and admitted to me that he did not know what to teach the students - today they were learning app development, but one did not know whether the publishers would still be asking for that tomorrow. And employers are often at a loss because they don't even know how to label a job ad sensibly.

      Digital Worker on competence-based job search

      No wonder many digital workers are looking for other solutions. As Regine Heidorn, which has broken off several courses of study and an IT training and has worked successfully as a programmer for years without any formal qualification. She has found another, very efficient platform for job search: Twitter. Here she is successful as a bitboutique, is in constant exchange with her network and twitters about her hobbies and interests.

      For example, she has tweeted about her hobby, geocaching; this resulted in a dialogue with Twitter, and she finally received a lehra job at a university. As she herself says, she did not even think about being asked for this qualification. In this way, Regine finds jobs that fit exactly to their abilities and which do not depend on the purely formal qualification, but on the actual abilities. But she also says that she does not need to apply for vacancies, where only the formal qualification is required.

      People instead of degrees: what does politics say?

      For me, this is where the advantages of competency-based work lie: the focus is on people, not formal qualifications and the curriculum vitae. Of course, the skills have to be right. And the example of Regine also shows the advantages of the Internet here: Finding like-minded people on a wide variety of topics quickly and easily.

      However, the change in the world of work is not a new phenomenon, as Ursula Engelen-Kefer made clear in the discussion of our panel of experts: For example, 1969 already had a paradigm shift in the continuing education landscape in Germany - due to the structural crisis in mining. At that time, the Arbeitsförderungsgesetz had begun to actively promote the unemployed through further education measures.

      Learning must be fundamental

      And that's exactly where, in education, Engelen-Kefer sees the crucial means to solve the problem. Learning has to change fundamentally, away from the idea "I am going to a classroom" towards competency-based further training. And away from the life concept of education - job - retirement, towards lifelong learning as a life concept, as is already practiced by a minority today; with which the general public still struggles.

      The continuing education landscape must therefore be fundamentally restructured, and aspects such as excessive demands on people, social skills and teamwork should also be taken into account. Exercising power by withholding information is, according to Engelen-Kefer, a thing of the past. Their hope therefore puts them in the younger generation. This has, as the second part of the contribution, which I will publish tomorrow, will show, of course, the problem has long been recognized and also developed initial solutions. However, there is still a huge hiccup with the implementation.

      How automation changes the labor market: 10 job trends of the future

      // By Mariano Mamertino

      Automation will change the job market significantly. As observed at Indeed, these changes from the front row. Based on our data, we analyzed 10 occupations and their growth in Germany.

      Data security

      We see on our side which jobs are offered worldwide and which skills are required. These data speak a clear language: the professional images of the future either complement the work of machines or are highly dependent on human qualities that can not be reproduced by a computer.

      Numerous corporate data breaches have made headlines in the past and show how skillful hackers have become in stealing data. However, these glitches also boosted the demand for two highly qualified IT jobs: IT security experts and cyber forensics experts to find out what went wrong.

      In recent years, the number of job advertisements for positions in IT security has not only increased significantly in Germany. It is evident worldwide that awareness of this topic is growing. One reason for this is likely to be scandals at large companies like Facebook, but also reports of data leaks at local companies.

      Virtual reality and IoT developers

      The job of software developer is changing just as dynamically as the technology itself. While web developers were in demand recently, companies are currently looking for mobile developers. However, the trend topic of the hour is the “Internet of Things” (IoT). This catchphrase refers to the networking of everyday objects via the network; from the car to the fridge. The term “Industry 4.0” is often used in Germany.

      The number of vacancies for IoT developers in Germany has increased rapidly in recent years. This shows the huge importance that Germany attaches to the development of networked technologies. In the UK, another area is growing just as dynamically. Jobs related to virtual reality have experienced a real boom in the last few years (+350 percent). For comparison: In Germany, tenders for virtual reality experts “only” increased by 53 percent. Since the market for virtual reality is currently developing extremely rapidly, we expect Germany to catch up here.