Many discussion topics have to come in to sharp focus in this COVID world over the last six months of 2020. One of those has been the deep downturn effect of the pandemic on the economy, the immediate reality of the loss of jobs in almost every sector of work you can name, from hospitality, entertainment and travel to manufacturing. This in addition to the pressure on workers, many declared essential, in every field of work from retail food stores and pharmacies to education to healthcare.
Work. What we do, where and how we work has altered in many measurable ways. While this is an ongoing pattern of disruption and adaptation and likely to be so for well into 2021 and beyond, an issue of massive longer-term concern is the question of how will career paths for individuals change or transform. If you still see a pathway in your current field of work, how, potentially, will you be re-directed? If you see no path forward or if you have not even set on exploring a path, how might you re-purpose yourself?
With these questions as a backdrop, over the last week I have now read the new book by Andrew Scott & Lynda Gratton, The New Long Life: A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World. Published in the UK in May 2020, it was written prior to the pandemic. However, the ideas and outlooks shared here, around the future we should consider around life, work and careers are emphatically as valid now.
If the prospect of a longer working life continues to follow trends in the last decade, the shift into multistage lives and fluid careers will form threads in our social narrative. Commentary on this and more in The New Long Life will wait, for as coincidence would have it, as I began to frame this first segment of a series of posts on the book, I got news of an event coming up on August 12th by way of a post from Zayna Khayat, Future Strategist of SE Health.
Zayna will be one of three panelists on a discussion group titled Careers after Crisis: Navigating Tomorrow’s Workforce. Hosted by the Emerging Leader Forum (ELF) a Toronto based community of healthcare professionals, this event will focus particularly on this theme of career disruption and adaptation in the health care sector. Healthcare in a COVID world is front and centre we know, which includes the long-term care system, which headlines much of our concern.
This August 12th ELF discussion, as they state in their event write-up, takes us futuristically to “the post-COVID-19 career trends and landscape”. While we’re not there yet, there is no reason why anyone should not have a voice and a view on what a better future might look in the continuum of a total healthcare system in Canada and globally.
As many thought leaders have observed, this COVID pandemic has exposed pre-existing gaps in healthcare as well as in other areas of society, and at the same time, it has accelerated certain trends that were already emergent. What is complex about the healthcare discussion is not unlike in other areas, it has many interconnected aspects. While looking at how the career landscape in healthcare is shifting, the ELF discussion will look to “bridge the gap between home care, cybersecurity, health technology and clinical quality/system transformation.”
Perhaps my previous twenty-plus years in the career development field has never left my mind, as it still keeps me interested in how our journey in the world of work continues its saga. So we have to be forward thinking as the ship is still on stormy seas, for though we have revisited this conversation of navigating tomorrow’s workforce several times in my course since the 1990’s this time feels different. I look forward to this panel because this is one world of work that we all have a vested interest in.