Adaptability – the key to the future Pivotal talent: The ultimate prize One clear lesson arises from our analysis: adaptability – in organisations, individuals and society – is essential for Automation of routine tasks encourages the increased navigating the changes ahead. specialism we see in the four worlds. This suggests that those workers with the critical skills that It’s impossible to predict exactly the skills that will organisations need will become the ultimate prize be needed even five years from now, so workers and – whether they are full‑time employees or contract organisations need to be ready to adapt – in each of the workers. These are the ‘pivotal’ people – those that worlds we envisage. contribute outsized and absolutely crucial value to their organisation. Inevitably, much of the responsibility will be on the individual. They will need not only to adapt to Finding and keeping these pivotal people will be a organisational change, but be willing to acquire new skills huge challenge in every world. They will be hard to and experiences throughout their lifetime, to try new tasks find and difficult, in a loyalty-light world, to keep. and even to rethink and retrain mid‑career. And in the hard‑driven Red and Blue worlds, the risk of losing pivotal people to burnout or early retirement Governments and organisations can and should do much (comfortably funded by the high rewards they’ll to help: easing the routes to training and retraining, and command) will be a constant worry. encouraging and incentivising adaptability and the critical and increasingly valued skills of leadership, creativity That’s why organisations will need to pay careful and innovation. attention to the employee value proposition – the reasons why these extraordinary people were attracted to working with them in the first place. 74% are ready to learn new skills or completely retrain in order to remain employable in the future. PwC survey of 10,029 members of the general population based in China, Germany, India, the UK and the US – base all those who are not retired 8,459 31