In a future world there may not be a retirement age, we may not all be working 9 -5 work, we may not have job descriptions and we will almost certainly not have culturally sanctioned employment certainty.

In this new landscape of employment we will work project and task, work at any age, work wherever is geographically or digitally best, come and go from employers and clients and work to a more fluid lifestyle, where work life balance and today’s social norms are culturally historical and no longer viable.

This world brings one of possibility and adventure, it mimics a pre industrial age, where we lived on the land we farmed or near the work we had, we worked when work needed to be done, where and when it needed to be done, lived with and close to family and within a community. This is not a rose colored view, times were as tough and as wonderful as they are today.

The constant is that there is and has been no perfect solution to employment and work and most probably will never be. The difference ahead is that we are moving into an era of greater choices and flexibility, where unlike the last 150 years we will not need as often many hands to make light work nor we will not need to gather together at a centralised means of production, but rather for many of us our work will be more decentralised and more fractured in its design, tasks, execution and measurement.

It is this world that James Lush of radio ABC Perth and I spoke about in our regular Saturday morning catch up. James’s  questions were thought provoking and made us both reach deeper to find threads of solutions and hints of tomorrow’s thinking.

I’d love you to have a listen to this interview and then share your thoughts on the future world of jobs.