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As we ring in the new year, and peer into the next decade, let’s take stock of where we are when it comes to the jobs of the future and how we’re going to prepare for them.

Jake Schwartz, General Assembly co-founder and CEO (Photo: General Assembly)

Our guest this week on Work in Progress is Jake Schwartz, the co-founder and CEO of General Assembly, a training and career transformation company specializing in the high-tech skills businesses need today.

Those skills are a moving target, but according to Schwartz, they always have been.

As technology has changed, so has work. “The chain has created jobs more than destroyed jobs, although in the micro, in almost every case it destroyed jobs initially,” he points out. “When mainframes were brought in, it really replaced rooms full of people that were called computers, right? And their job was to make all sorts of calculations, all day long.”

The difference now, Schwartz says, is the speed at which the changes are happening. “What’s happened in the last 30 years is that the accessibility of these incredibly powerful microprocessors — a device in every pocket and all of that — has created a much larger consumer base consuming and using, purchasing and developing, on these different platforms. And that has sort of accelerated the rate of change right around what work looks like.”

So what does the continuing evolution of technology mean for jobs of the future? What skills should you be concentrating on? Schwartz has some very definite views on those questions. Listen here, or find Work in Progress wherever you get your podcasts.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Episode 112: The Future of Work: 2020 and Beyond
Host: Ramona Schindelheim, WorkingNation Editor-in-Chief
Producer: Anny Celsi
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.