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What is the future of your job? Monday 18 January 2016 The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report seeks to understand the current and future impact of key disruptions on employment levels, skill sets and recruitment patterns in different industries and countries. It does so by asking the talent and strategy executives of today’s largest employers to imagine how jobs in their industry will change up to the year 2020. Here are our findings: Technological disruption is interacting with socio-economic, geopolitical and demographic factors to create a perfect storm in labour markets in the next five years. Developments in previously disjointed fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing and genetics and biotechnology are all building on and amplifying one another. Concurrent to this technological revolution are a set of broader socio-economic, geopolitical and demographic developments, with nearly equivalent impact to the technological factors. Jobs gains in the next five years will not be enough to offset expected losses, meaning we have a difficult transition ahead. Current trends could lead to a net employment impact of more than 5.1 million jobs lost to disruptive labour market changes over the period 2015-2020, with a total loss of 7.1 million jobs – two-thirds of which are concentrated in routine white collar office functions, such as office and administrative roles – and a total gain of 2 million jobs, in computer and mathematical, and architecture and engineering related fields. Manufacturing and production roles are also expected to see a further bottoming out but are also anticipated to have relatively good potential for upskilling, redeployment and productivity enhancement through technology rather than pure substitution. If you are choosing your college degree today, STEM skills are a good bet – but most importantly you will need to learn and specialize throughout your lifetime. Two new and emerging job types stand out due to the frequency and consistency with which they were mentioned across practically all industries and geographies. The first is the role of data analyst, which companies expect will help them make sense and derive insights from the torrent of data generated by technological disruptions. The second is the role of specialized sales representative, as practically every industry will need to become more skilled in commercializing and explaining their new offerings to unfamiliar businesses, government clients or consumers. A new type of senior manager will also be in demand – one who can successfully steer companies through the upcoming change and disruption. Even as jobs shrink, companies will find it harder to recruit. Given the overall disruption industries are experiencing, it is not surprising that, with current trends, competition for talent in high-growth job families such as computing, mathematics, architecture and engineering, and other strategic and specialist roles, will be fierce. Finding efficient ways of securing a solid talent pipeline will be a priority for virtually every industry. Even in those job families that will have losses, the roles will become more specialized, making them harder to recruit for if current education and skilling trends stay as they are. Regardless of the job you are in, expect to face pressure to constantly modify your skills. Across nearly all industries, the impact of technological and other changes is shortening the shelf-life of employees’ existing skill sets. What’s more, in this new environment, business model change often translates to skill set disruption almost simultaneously and with only a minimal time lag. Even jobs that will shrink in number are simultaneously undergoing change in the skill sets required to do them. On average, by 2020, more than a third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations will be comprised of skills that are not yet considered crucial to the job today. In addition, technical skills will need to be supplemented with strong social and collaboration skills. The threat of automation and a jobless future could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if both employers and employees don’t act today. Not anticipating and addressing disruptions to employment and skills in a timely manner may come at an enormous economic and social cost. Business leaders are aware of the looming challenges but have been slow to act decisively. Currently, only 53% of chief human resource officers surveyed are reasonably or highly confident regarding the adequacy of their organization’s future workforce strategy to prepare for the shifts ahead. At the same time, workers in lower skilled roles may find themselves caught up in a vicious cycle where they could face redundancy without significant re- and upskilling even while disruptive change may erode employers’ incentives and the business case for investing in such reskilling. Government, business – and you – will need a mindset shift towards education and employment. For a talent revolution to take place, firms can no longer be passive consumers of ready-made human capital. Instead, businesses will need to put talent development and future workforce strategy front and centre to their growth. Governments will need to show bolder leadership in putting through curricula and labour market regulation changes that are already decades overdue in some economies. And all of us will need to take much great responsibility for our own talent development by embracing lifelong learning. Saadia Zahidi and Till Leopold both work for the World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs report is published 18 January. The World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2016 is held in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, 20-23 January. Article source: http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/what-is-the-future-of-your-job <Questions> Q1. Do you satisfied with your job? What are the merits and demerits of your job? Q2. How do you answer 'Why should we hire you' in a job interview? Q3. According to an article, required skills for employee have been changed since 2015 although many contents show similarities. Can you tell the difference for required employees' skills in 2020 from the ones in 2015? Q4. Which skills do you have among 10 skill above? Q5. What skills are you preparing to upgrade your personal value in your work place? Q6. Do you have any intention to work as a freelancer? Q7. Do you have any job field that you want to work in the future? |
100 BEST COMPANIES TO WORK FOR in 2016
Google/Alphabet is the No. 1 place to work for the seventh time in 10 years. Six newcomers include Veterans United at No. 30, Hilton Hotels at No. 56, and Slalom Consulting at No. 100. IKEA’s U.S. arm returns to the list, along with GoDaddy and Sheetz.
METHODOLOGY
To identify the 100 Best Companies to Work For, each year Fortune partners with Great Place to Work to conduct the most extensive employee survey in corporate America.
Two-thirds of a company’s survey score is based on the results of the Trust Index Employee Survey, which is sent to a random sample of employees from each company. This survey asks questions related to employees’ attitudes about management’s credibility, overall job satisfaction, and camaraderie. The other third is based on responses to the Culture Audit, which includes detailed questions about pay and benefit programs and a series of open-ended questions about hiring practices, methods of internal communication, training, recognition programs, and diversity efforts.
To register for the 100 Best Companies to Work For list, which allows participation in all our Best Workplaces lists, including Millennials, Women, Diversity, and over a dozen additional lists, go to greatplacetowork.com/100Best.
Article source : http://fortune.com/best-companies/#methodology
Google's sharing its HR secrets.
Can you make them work in your organization?
Written by Knowledge@Wharton/ Published Thursday 10 March 2016
For six years in a row, Google has topped Fortune’s list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” It has also been recognized over 100 times in the past five years as an exceptional employer both in the U.S. and other countries.
What makes Google’s work environment so outstanding? Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations for Google, has authored a book titled,Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead. Speaking at a 2015 Wharton People Analytics Conference, he called the book “really an effort to open-source what we learned at Google … to make work better in other places.”
Bock leads Google’s people function globally, which includes “all areas related to the attraction, development and retention of ‘Googlers,’” to quote his bio. He observed candidly that for too many people in the workforce today, “work just sucks…. It’s just not pleasant; it’s a means to an end.” He pointed out that “nobody works 40-hour weeks anymore,” and that if one were to actually calculate it, people spend more time working than they do anything else, including hobbies, being with loved ones and even sleeping. “If we’re going to invest all that time, it should mean something; it should motivate you. You should love it.”
In his talk, Bock described some of the innovations he and his team have made at Google to make work more effective and enjoyable. The special sauce, he said, is introducing more analytics into the realm of HR.
HR Needs More Than Just HR People
According to Bock, one significant difference about Google’s HR division — or People Operations, as the company calls it — is that a “three-thirds” hiring model is used to staff it. Bock explained that one-third consists of people from traditional HR backgrounds, another third is recruited from strategy consulting and the final third is composed of academics in fields ranging from organizational psychology to physics.
“If we’re going to invest all that time [in working], it should mean something; it should motivate you. You should love it.”
Bock observed that “each brings something different to the party.” The traditional HR people, he said, understand Google, have great intuition and can deal well with problematic situations. The consultants understand business in general, and can take a complex problem, structure it and break it down for analysis. And the academics “actually force us to prove that all this stuff we’re [claiming] actually works.”
For 30 years, “HR as a profession has been saying we need a seat at the table, only to be told that [we] need to understand the business first,” said Bock. But they need to demonstrate more than just “an understanding of an income statement…. If I say performance management should work a certain way, or that we should stop doing a certain kind of recruitment, that takes more than just understanding the business. That takes analytics.”
Bock described how he and his colleagues changed some basic hiring processes at Google based on experimentation and analysis. One change was to the average number of interviews it took to hire someone. When he first became head of people operations in 2006, building up the staff was a priority. Yet it was taking somewhere between six and nine months to get hired. The absurdly long hiring cycle became notorious: Bock recalled that “everyone had a story about their bad interview experience with Google,” and people would eagerly share it with him whether he was out to dinner in a restaurant, looking at houses with a realtor or anywhere else.
“So we did a lot of math, we did a lot of experiments,” said Bock. In Work Rules! he credits then-staffing analyst Todd Carlisle with discovering that four interviews were sufficient to predict with 86% confidence whether or not the company should hire someone. The company then instituted this “Rule of Four,” and Google’s time to hire, according to Bock, “went from something like six months to 45 days.” (During Bock’s tenure, Google’s number of employees has grown from, he writes, from “6,000 employees to almost 60,000, with 70-plus offices across more than 40 countries.”)
And who was Google hiring? Another problem perceived by Bock was that “we were really biased toward people with fancy degrees…. If you attend Harvard versus being number one at SUNY Binghamton, who does better?” He quoted findings that showed that the very best students from any school outperformed the average students — and even the 60-70th percentile students — at major Ivy League universities. Bock commented, “So there’s actually evidence to suggest [that] as a recruiter, you’re better off casting a wider net, which is what we do.”
The absurdly long hiring cycle became notorious: Bock recalled that “everyone had a story about their bad interview experience with Google.”
Grades, too, have been overrated, said Bock. “We did a bunch of analysis and found that grades are a little predictive for your first couple of years, but for the rest of your career, they don’t matter at all…. What matters is the education you got and your ability to learn…. We know those things are predictive.” Bock also shifted Google’s focus away from SAT scores. He said it had been a mistake for the company to be asking all candidates, some as old as 50, for their SAT scores (and college transcript), often passing on those that didn’t score high enough.
Performance Management at Google
Bock has also brought his analytical approach to evaluating existing employees, managers and teams. He described a study of the top quartile of good managers, reviewing their behavior to see what they did differently from less-effective managers. But the only way to truly measure the effect of a manager’s performance on his or her team, said Bock, would be to make people switch teams. Although normally that would be “cruel,” said Bock, Google provided a natural laboratory for the experiment, because Googlers, as a company policy, routinely switch jobs. So Bock was able to assess whether bad performers working for bad managers improved when they went to work for good ones, and vice versa. He compiled evidence that showed that “the actions that a manager takes actually have measurable, real consequences in terms of performance…. It was a beautiful, beautiful finding,” said Bock.
Other HR functions that are handled differently at Google include the well-known (and generally dreaded) annual performance evaluation. Google has a structure whereby employee development feedback is separated from performance feedback. Bock noted that this was instituted because when people receive feedback that they believe threatens their bonus or salary grade, they become defensive and stop listening.
“We’ve all worked with people who are kind of struggling, and you go to them and say: ‘Hey, things aren’t going so well….’ [Then,] they devote all kinds of energy toward arguing, ‘My performance is fine — you, manager, just don’t get it.’” Then, said Bock, they spend two weeks documenting their performance themselves. And many managers’ typical response will be: “Oh, just take the bonus.” At Google, on the other hand, said Bock, “we want our managers to be open to developing people…. We do that by removing the performance stigma.”
Managers, too, are evaluated. At Google there are twice-yearly surveys in which employees give upward feedback. The organization has some unique transparency around the reporting of this, although Bock points out that it has limitations. He explained that if an executive has more than 100 direct reports, the survey is made openly available. But executives who have fewer reports get to choose whether or not to make the results public — a rule based on the idea that a manager’s low rating might have been caused by “a good purpose.” “If you have a manager whose ratings look really low … she [might be] trying to make the team better. She’s being really tough, and firing people, and moving people around, [and that’s why] the team’s going to be unhappy.” Google doesn’t want everyone in the organization to assume this person is a terrible manager, said Bock, when she might be one of the best.
“[We found that] the actions that a manager takes actually have measurable, real consequences in terms of performance. It was a beautiful, beautiful finding.”
A Word to the Wise HR Professional
Bock noted that getting Google to allow him and his team to establish a robust human resources program has often been an uphill battle, even though he said he has “fought for performance management from day one.” He commented that Google is an engineering company, and as such there are some special challenges. “My brother’s an engineer, my dad’s an engineer, so I can say this,” he began. “[Engineers] are really good at one set of problems, and they’re really smart, and so they extrapolate that they’re good at all kinds of problems, and know better.”
In addition, he said, Google has a culture in which the employees — who are, of course, engineers — run the company. So Bock’s early attempts to introduce programs like talent management and succession planning were not well received. “Eric Schmidt [Google’s then-CEO] told me, ‘That’s all a waste of time; that’s a terrible idea,’ and I thought, ‘This is not going well.’” He said that the mechanism to finally achieve change was to start with small pilot experiments. “We did a small experiment on only 6,500 of our employees recently where we had around eight different systems running in parallel to figure out what worked the best.”
Bock stated that a company doesn’t have to be as big or profitable as Google to run some experiments from its HR department. He advised HR practitioners to “hire somebody with a quant background and a semester or two of MBA-level statistics. That’s all you need … someone to be able to tell random variation from actual, cause-driven variation.” He suggested HR professionals think of a problem that both matters to the business and is interesting to them, and examine performance differences between different categories of people. Then they could set up test situations. “Take two more groups — it doesn’t matter if they’re five-person groups or 500-person groups … and say, ‘We’re going to treat them differently, and let’s see what happens.’”
Bock observed: “All of our clients, all the people we work with and partner with, they all think they’re really good at ‘people stuff.’ Because our [human] intuition is to think, ‘I’m a keen judge of character; I of course, make fair decisions; I’m completely unbiased.’ And we all make unfair decisions. We’re all biased. So, whenever you can qualify what you’re saying with these experiments is a way to get there and improve your credibility.”
Article source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/googles-sharing-its-hr-secrets-can-you-make-them-work-in-your-organization?utm_content=bufferf854f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
<Questions>
Q1. What is your priority when you are choosing the company that you want to work for?
Q2. Do you think what is the winning secret of GOOGLE which was ranked in No. 1 place to work for the seventh time in 10 years?
Q3. Do you have any company you want to work for among 100 best companies of 2016?
7 science-backed tips for reading faster and retaining more
Caitlin Schiller, Blinkist/ Mar. 26, 2016, 1:00 PM
Books: some of the world’s best discoveries are contained within them, and new ideas spark to life as we plumb their pages. But as modern readers, it’s hard to find time to spend in their company. Adding to that is the fact that, even when we do find the time, it’s not always a given that we’ll retain what we’ve read.
But what if we could? Would you feel more confident at work? Would you start a new project? Would you be able to go through your day more smoothly, feeling more assured? Would you go on Jeopardy and win?
At Blinkist, we discovered the formula for deep, meaningful reading four years and 1,500 books ago. Today, we’re going to share it with you. So grab a piece of paper and a pencil, tune in, in get ready to rediscover how to read with our 7 science-backed steps.
1. Find a personal angle
In "Brain-Based Learning," Eric Jensen notes that for our brains to truly learn something, that something needs to have meaning. The thing about meaning is that it’s best conferred by giving the topic personal relevance.
What do you think you’d remember better? Someone tells you a forest in China is on fire, or that the field near your childhood home burst into flame? Jensen’s research concluded that you’re more likely to remember the flaming field in your hometown. This is so because relevance evokes emotions, and new knowledge sticks best when it’s attached to something familiar — bonus if it’s on fire.
Use the science: Get motivated! Find out why the content is personal and relevant to you with the help of these 3 questions:
- What do you want to learn from this piece of content?
- How might it change you life for the better?
- What kind of people should read it in general, and why are you one of them?
2. Get a bird’s eye view
"How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler & Charles Van Doren was one of the very first manuals on the subject. In it, they tout a preliminary skim called inspectional reading. This entails sampling pages throughout the book, but listening for the “pulsebeat”—or the central theme. The pulsebeat is the core of the book’s vitality, and it’s also your key to retaining more.
Learning theory pioneer Leslie Hart found that, contrary to what many educators believe, presenting information in fragments doesn’t actually make learning more manageable. Getting the basic outline of a concept, however, can.
While it’s true that the brain simultaneously perceives parts and wholes, without any idea of what the whole should look like, the brain can’t assemble it from the disembodied parts that make up a concept. Once it has a lay of the land from 1,000 feet, the brain can correctly place and interrelate all of the hills and meandering rivers of new insight and knowledge.
Use the science
Spend 20 minutes skimming the book or reading online summaries with the goal of finding out
1) what the book is about and
2) the main takeaway.
You’ll read more efficiently and retain knowledge better with this broad view.
3. Drum up curiosity
When presented with new concepts, it’s our own curiosity that awakens an attitude of awe—which is great, because that awe primes our brains to learn.
“There’s this basic circuit in the brain that energizes people to go out and get things that are intrinsically rewarding,” Ranganath explains. This circuit lights up when we get money, or candy. It also lights up when we’re curious.
When the circuit is activated, our brains release a chemical called dopamine, which gives us a high. “The dopamine also seems to play a role in enhancing the connections between cells that are involved in learning.”
UC Davis Psychologist Charan Raganath conducted a study that asked volunteers 100 trivia questions on topics from Beatles discography to the origins of the word “dinosaur.” With the help of an MRI machine, Raganath and his researchers found that when participants felt especially curious, the brain regions regulating pleasure and reward sparkled to life.
When this circuit is activated, our brains release the hormone dopamine, which gives us a high, and also helps enhance connections between cells involved in learning.
Raganath’s curious participants also showed increased activity in the hippocampus, which is involved in creating memories. It follows that when they were questioned later, these extra curious participants proved more likely to remember what they’d learned.
So what is the essence of curiosity? That gap between what you want to know and what you already know — what "Made to Stick" authors Chip and Dan Heath refer to as the curiosity gap. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do we humans, so when we’re driven by a desire to close that breach. That drive’s something you can use when you read.
Use the science:
Before you begin to read, craft a few good curiosity gap questions. Check out the back of the book or a few reviews online for help: this content is made to get you interested in the book, so it’ll lead you in the right direction.
4. Create your own structure
Researchers who studied the use of personal organization techniques like mind mapping have found that these tools really help with learning and retention.
They work not only because they stimulate the visual part of the brain, but also because in creating such a mind map, learners organize information based on how they have attributed relevance. Relevance, as we discovered in part one, is one of the key ingredients to retention.
Of course, books already come with structures, but they belong to the author or the editor. Your brain, however, will have a much easier time remembering a new concept from your reading if you devise your own structure to give it personal meaning.
Use the science:
Flip through the book you’re about to read and see what kind of structure there might be. Identify the key points, separate them into elemental chunks and write them down, making sure to leave plenty of space between each for your own notes.
5. Record key insights
Grab your pencil! It’s time to take some (original) notes.
In their book "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning," Psychologists Henry L. Roediger and Mark A. McDaniel reveal that we’ve been wrong about what actually constitutes the smartest techniques for learning, like highlighting.
Neither highlighting nor writing down word-for-word notes straight out of the book is effective because you aren’t creating and enforcing original neural pathways. The good news is that your brain will take the smaller chunks of information that you write down in your own words and connect it to knowledge you already have — particularly if you contextualize that information by placing it in your structure.
Use the science:
In your own words, make brief notes about your main takeaways from the reading and find the best place for these insights in the structure you’ve crafted. You’ll end up with a summary of the book in your own words, made in a way your brain best understands.
6. Review your notes
Neurons are linked by synapses to create a unique pathway describing what you’ve learned. In much the same way that wandering pedestrians wear down informal footpaths through a park, the more often you recall a certain piece of information, the stronger and deeper you’re impressing its unique “footpath” in your memory.
Conversely, if the information is never recalled and reviewed, the pathway fades and disappears. If you want to keep something you’ve learned, you’ve got to dredge it up and look at it. Often.
In Brain Based Learning, Jensen recommends reviewing material within ten minutes of learning it, then again 48 hours later, and again in seven days. The shakier your memory, the more you’ll benefit from repeated activation of the pathway.
Use the science:
Thanks to step six, you’re already armed with your own personally relevant summary. Read it for 10 minutes after you finish the book, then again three days later, and keep resurrecting it for up to a month.
As you review the summary, try to remember other details related to the messages you’ve recorded. With each repetition, you’ll be blazing that trail ever more certainly into the geography of your brain.
Article source : http://www.businessinsider.com/7-science-backed-tips-for-reading-faster-and-retaining-more-2016-3?utm_content=bufferb93bf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
<Questions>
Q1. What is the main source of your knowledge? Experiences, books or movies? Please share your principal learning source !
Q2. Do you enjoy reading books? How many books do you read per year? What kind of books do you like to read? Please share any impressive book you've read before.
Q3. Sometimes, after reading we hardly remember the contents of the books. How about you? Generally, how many percentage of contents do you grasp ?
Q4. Do you think below 7 science-backed steps are workable for you to rediscover how to read books better?
1. Find a personal angle
2. Get a bird’s eye view
3. Drum up curiosity
4. Create your own structure
6. Review your notes
Q4. Have you ever joined any book club before? How do you like it?
These pigeons wearing tiny backpacks are
tracking London’s air pollution
By Megha Cherian on March 27, 2016
Pigeons in London aren’t just pesky scavengers roaming the city. They’re fighting air pollution.
A special group of homing pigeons wearing tiny, lightweight backpacks were tasked with the job of measuring air quality across the British capital.
Plume Labs, a Paris-based company carrying out scientific studies on air quality, launched the pilot project, Pigeon Air Patrol, last Monday. The company worked with atmospheric scientists at Imperial College London to develop the little backpack air monitors.
The pigeons were outfitted with tiny sensors that measure ozone and nitrogen dioxide levels then released throughout the city. Over the course of three days, they measured harmful emissions that aren’t always visible to the naked eye. The results reported on Twitter ranged from “moderate” to “extreme.” Londoners could get updates on local pollution data by tweeting @PigeonAir.
The Pigeon Air Patrol complemented the company’s Plume Air Report, which collects pollution data from monitoring sites in 40 countries and makes the information available to residents along with advice on how to avoid overexposure in real time.
The data is particularly important in London. The city is one of the most polluted in Europe, largely because of diesel exhaust from vehicles.
Polluted air is linked to 9,500 premature deaths in London. Around the world air pollution is responsible for almost 7 million premature deaths.
Air pollution is a global problem (since air knows no border). Creative ideas like the Pigeon Air Patrol can lead the way in saving lives and protecting the environment by improving monitoring.
"Millions of people die every year around the world from air pollution -- it's basically a pandemic, but we have a hard time realizing this because it's largely invisible," Romaine Lacombe, the CEO of Plume Labs told CNN.
The Pigeon Air Patrol aimed to increase awareness of daily exposure to pollution, an issue many city-dwellers don't take seriously enough according to Lacombe.
While the pigeon project only ran for three days, Plume Labs hopes to put lightweight pollution sensors on people some day. They're using a crowdfunding site to recruit 100 Londoners to test the devices as they move about the city over the coming months.
And the pigeons aren’t done with their job just yet. They might be used to tweet real-time pollution alerts in other large cities.
Article source : https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/pigeon-air-patrol-tracking-london-air-pollution/
<Questions>
Q1. How do you think about pigeons wearing tiny backpacks monitoring air pollution?
Q2. Do you think air pollution in Korea is serious problem? How do you think about the air quality in your residential area?
Q3. In your region, can you find pigeons easily? How do you think about those birds?
Q4. How do you think about this idea using doves instead of high technological machine or drone?
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