Lynda Gratton talks jobs at WEF Growth Summit

London Business School’s Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour Lynda Gratton participated at the World Economic Forum’s The Growth Summit in Geneva on 2 and 3 May 2023. Lynda, who is an expert in the interface between people and organisations, spoke about jobs and moderated a meeting of Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs), at which attendees discussed the role CHROs play in the growth agenda and how they influence it.

The Growth Summit brought together the worlds of business, government and civil society, as well as international organisations and academic leaders to discuss how to enable resilient growth, develop human capital and accelerate economic equity.

According to Lynda, there is a mixed picture in terms of jobs growth with some industries such as green tech on the ascendant and others in decline. Unsurprisingly, tech is expected to have a big impact on some jobs with certain tasks more readily suited to automation. It’s not all doom and gloom, however, as automation will free up time for humans to do new work. This will, of course, require new skills to be developed and it is the question of which skills will be required that was focusing minds at the WEF event, along with issues around productivity and the need to better understand which tasks can and should be eliminated in order to improve productivity.

As Lynda wrote in her regular column for The Times recently, reskilling workers in the face of technological advances such as ChatGPT will require business and governments to collaborate to support workers otherwise a significant number of workers will lose out.