To date, every big change in how people work has lifted skills upwards and improved the world of work. The wheel, electricity and the Industrial Revolution all moved us forward, building new capabilities on top of the old ones. Less manual labour, greater intellectual skills, more types of work activities.
The change Artificial Intelligence will drive is different. Although we are not seeing wholesale depletions of workforces, we can already see that junior roles are being removed from the career ladder and replaced by AI. This is a trend that we can expect to see continue as AI works its way up the corporate career ladder.
Dayforce’s latest Pulse of Talent research, Fast now, fragile later, puts numbers to what many of us are already seeing. Among Australian respondents:
At OneSchool Global, we are not seeing a decrease in our headcount or FTE. However, the trend highlighted by the Dayforce report can be seen in our workforce as the roles at the bottom of the ladder are thinning out. I expect that we will see these disappearing roles move upwards over time, from junior roles to mid-level roles and beyond.
Looking to the future, we can clearly see the workforce cliff that Dayforce calls ‘workforce fragility’, and the need to prepare for a future where workforces are no longer dependant as much on employees. If the first rungs go, the question becomes simple: how does a young person get onto the ladder at all?
The problem we are trying to solve isn’t a people problem and we won’t solve it with old solutions; the problem is one of design and structure.
The usual answer unions and governments come up with for workplace changes is training and development. Training matters, and employers have a responsibility to provide it. But it can’t be most of the answer. Dayforce found that 55% of Australian workers are expected to build new skills on top of the same workload, yet only 28% say they have enough time at work to do it.
The deeper problem is structural. We’ve built our labour market around permanent and full-time jobs. As a society, we’ve diversified our businesses and our supply chains. Now it’s time to diversify careers.
This is called the portfolio economy: people working across several organisations, delivering defined pieces of work, and building careers that reflect their skills and choices. This isn’t the “gig economy” of insecure, low-paid work. It’s about inclusion and choice. Today’s full-time workforce model shuts out many people who want to contribute, including carers, parents returning to work, older workers, people with disability and people who want to combine roles.
This permanent model is fragile for both sides. Organisations carry fixed costs they can’t adjust. Workers depend on one employer for their income, their skills and their security. When that job ends, they lose all of it at once, and the capability they built often goes with it.
I’m not arguing for less protection. I’m arguing for protection designed around the way people actually work. If organisations gain flexibility, they should pay for it, and the risk should be shared rather than pushed onto workers. That could mean:
Capability accounts: every engagement adds to a person’s training fund, so their skills keep growing throughout their career.
This isn’t theoretical. Australia has already started. The Fair Work Commission’s new minimum standards for gig delivery workers came from unions and industry designing protection together. The next step is to apply that thinking to skilled and professional work.
The challenges are real. Questions about intellectual property, continuity and competitiveness need answers. In education especially, continuity for students matters enormously, and not every role should become portfolio work. But with AI continuing to broaden its skill-base and capability, many roles will begin to be applied this way, and our system shouldn’t make that impossible. Governments, unions, businesses large and small, and educators need to design this new marketplace together. It depends on leaders being brave enough and to care enough to take on this transformation.
As a global school, we have a particular responsibility here, because the students in our learning centres today will enter this workforce.
If adaptability, self-direction and continuous learning are becoming core workplace capabilities, we can’t wait until people start work to develop them. At OneSchool Global, our multi-award-winning Learning to Learn framework has developed self-directed learners for more than three decades. Students learn to own their learning, set goals and manage their time. A young person who leaves school with those habits leaves with the ability to reskill and adapt as work changes.
That’s what we mean by life ready: prepared for whatever the future of work looks like, even when none of us can predict it.
We can’t underestimate how much AI will change the way organisations work. Many of our old ideas about protecting workforces need to be rethought. But, if we keep protecting the old way of doing things, we stay in the past. Building the portfolio economy means trusting people with more choice and giving them the protection to make that choice safely.
Dr Anat Hassner is Global Chief Operating Officer at OneSchool Global. An organisational psychologist with a PhD in change management, she has led strategy, people and transformation work across the corporate, government and not-for-profit sectors across Australia and globally.
