In this episode, we discuss the surprising future of work, the truth about robots, automation, and jobs, and how you can best position yourself for a successful career within the future of work with our guest Jeff Wald. 

Jeff Wald is a serial entrepreneur and the Founder of WorkMarket and Spinback, as well as several other businesses, and has exited companies to ADP and Salesforce. He is an expert on labor and the future of work, and the author of The End of Jobs: The Rise of On-Demand Workers and Agile Corporations. Jeff is also an angel investor and startup advisor and serves on numerous public and private Boards of Directors.

• Work has always been changing and evolving.

• Today, the number of hours worked continues to decrease across the globe.. in conjunction with an increase in our standard of living.

• 2019 was the best year to be alive as a human, bar none. It was the best year ever for humanity. Covid is likely a statistical blip.

• There are 17mm robots on the planet today. Robots are dumb, clumsy, and expensive. Robots and AI will certainly displace a VERY large number of jobs, the data tells you when you analyze job function by function, over 700 job functions, 10-15% of jobs over the next 20 years or so, will slowly go away.

• More jobs will be created than we lose over the next 20 years

• The big challenge is not the jobs that will leave, the challenge is retraining

• The five most dangerous words in business are “this time it’s different.”

• What is the “labor equation” and how does it impact the decision-making of companies hiring and staffing jobs in a world of disruptive technological change?

• How ATMs transformed the banking industry in a way that you would not at all expect.

• What are co-bot jobs and how do they shape work?

• How does on-demand labor factor into the future of work?

• On-demand labor has been a part of the economy for a long time

• The mistaken myth of lifetime employment - it was a notion, not a reality.

• In 2020 the average worker spends 4.2 years in a job. In 1960 at the height of the “golden age of lifetime employment” was 5 years.

• The labor market moves very slowly and the changes take place very slowly over time.

• How do we deal with the challenge of retraining our labor force?

  • Who owns this problem?

    • Individual workers?

    • Companies?

    • Schools?

    • Societies?

    • Technology?

• 25 million workers in the US are going to have their jobs disrupted over the next 20-25 years.

  • To get a sense of this disruption, look at the manufacturing industry which has lost around 8mm jobs since 1980

• What should we do to stay nimble, keep our jobs, and succeed in this future of work?

• You MUST be a lifelong learner to succeed in the future work world.

• Skill used to be useful in the workplace for 30 years, today it's 4-6 years before a skill is rendered obsolete.

• Several shocking predictions about the future of work for the next 20 years.