The nature and scope of work is changing rapidly, creating massive business challenges in the shadow of broader political and social shifts. HBS launched a major initiative in 2017 on Managing the Future of Work to define these workplace issues and highlight their implications for business leaders. The Managing the Future of Work course reflects some of the learnings from this initiative and will cover the following main themes:
- Automation and its impact on jobs and different segments of the workforce
- Mismatch between skill demand and supply, including demographic factors and geographic differences across places
- Evolving labor models, including the gig economy and remote work in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic
- Actions steps around training, policy, and entrepreneurship.
The course allows students to examine different perspectives around the future of work, taking on the lens of business, policy, and workforce development institutions in advanced economies. The material gives a modest edge to implications for business leadership in corporations (i.e., what opportunities might be available for firms like Apple or Unilever, and what should they do?) and emerging business concepts and applications in start-up companies.
Embedded in the approach is the assumption that tackling these complex workplace issues will require new competencies for executives, including the ability to collaborate with and understand the needs of labor stakeholders, policy leaders, and educators. Part of becoming a leader versed in future of work issues is the ability to understand tradeoffs, and fully contextualizing the costs, benefits, and spillover implications of decisions or policies requires familiarity with data. A key component of the will center around data fluency in debates and projects where original data analysis is used to inform conclusions.
This course is a great fit for students who want to position themselves for careers in the future of work landscape. These roles could be as a startup founder for a company related to the future of work, as a business executive guiding a larger firm through its required transformation, as a leader within policy and labor groups interacting with firms, or as a learning and development leader playing an important role in training and reskilling.
The class is taught by Christopher Stanton. Class sessions include case studies, primers that layout the core issues on topics, and playbook reports designed for business and policy leaders. We also mix in multi-media content (podcasts, videos, etc.) where best suited. Class guests are frequent.
Course grades are based on class participation (40%), exercises and presentations of analysis (35%), an individual writeup reflecting on group exercise 2 (15%), and short-answer responses to pre-class questions (10%).