This report for the Corporate Research Forum summarises the main demographic, economic and technology trends shaping the future of work in 2018.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
Ezra Solomon, American economist, 1984
The famous quote hasn’t deterred people from making predictions about the future of work and employment. One thing we can say about the future of work with reasonable confidence is that there are now more articles, programmes, reports and books about it than ever before. Hardly a week goes by without a consultancy, think tank or university serving up an imaginative version of the future.
It’s interesting, and sometimes amusing, to look at predictions made about the present day. There were a number towards the end of the last decade which took the year 2020 as the context for their brave new worlds. As that is now only 14 months away we can make a reasonable assessment of how close these predictions were to what we see today. The degree of accuracy is patchy, to put it politely.