Prepare Your Workforce for the Job Disruption Wave of 2024 and Beyond

By Dr. Kelly Monahan and Alexandra Levit

After more than 150 years, the very concept of a “job” is changing.

According to online consensus, the word “job,” meaning a paid, permanent position of employment, was first used routinely in 1858. Ever since, most individuals’ jobs have been discrete and straightforward; either you were a tradesperson such as a carpenter or a mechanic, or you were a professional such as a physician or an attorney. For all of these professions, you were required to learn a limited number of skills that, for the most part, didn’t change for your entire career.

Today’s workplace is much different. In 2023, the Upwork Research Institute teamed up with Wikistrat, a scenario planning firm, to identify the top drivers disrupting the way we work.¹ The group of 21 global experts, with over 30% representing senior executive positions in the Fortune 500, found that the nature of employment is becoming much more fluid and complex, with variables including taskification, skill-scaling, generational preferences, distributed and contract work environments, and the uptake of generative AI all on the rise.

Given these drivers, it’s virtually impossible for individual jobs to remain as siloed and static as they’ve traditionally been. Job disruption is occurring whether we’re prepared for it or not. Leaving existing job structures intact because we fear what reconfiguration will involve is not an effective long-term strategy. In this paper, we’ll argue that it’s critical that leaders be willing to reimagine what constitutes a job, understand the various forces of disruption, and undertake widespread job redesign in its wake.

Experts call for the evolution of the job

The need to understand job disruption has been a growing concern for the past several years. In 2017, Thomas Friedman remarked that “work is being disconnected from jobs, and jobs and work are being disconnected from companies, which are increasingly becoming platforms.”² At that time, it was evident that the platform economy was disrupting taxi and hospitality jobs with the rise of companies like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, which could seamlessly match workers with customers in real time and create strong economies of scale with otherwise scarce resources.

More recently in 2022, future of work experts Ravin Jesuthasan and John Bordeaux wrote the book “Work Without Jobs,” in which they describe companies organizing a flow of work around skills and tasks rather than traditional jobs. In essence, they argue that job deconstruction, which is the unbundling of formal job roles into smaller elements like tasks and projects, allows leaders to more efficiently match human skills and technology applications with the business problems at hand. It’s no wonder that research published by MIT’s Sloan Management Review states that job deconstruction is the “central organizing principle for making more people more valuable in more organizations.” ³

The four forces of job disruption

We currently see job disruption playing out in several ways. Our crowd of experts and Upwork research identified core areas that are driving the reorganization of work around skills, tasks, and projects rather than traditional job design. These factors include distributed and contract work structures, taskification, skill-scaling and renewal, and of course, generative AI.

Distributed and contract work structures

A majority of knowledge workers no longer work together in the same location. In addition, work is increasingly being executed across functional teams (XFNs), with job responsibilities no longer isolated to one department. When work is primarily independent and operating in a silo, organizing it around jobs makes perfect sense. But recent research shows that the majority of knowledge workers (66%) are working across locations and/or functions every day at work.⁴ In fact, only 19% of them reported working co-located with their direct team.

As we begin to work cross-functionally on project-based work that is highly interdependent and includes individuals with all types of employment structures (including part-time and contract workers), operating within the confines of typical job descriptions becomes more problematic.

For example, some types of work are better suited to asynchronous activity than others. In addition, different types of work arrangements are growing that require employers to think outside a traditional full-time model. Both of these situations require the original notion of the job to evolve. And now that our horizons have been expanded with respect to the variety of ways work can be accomplished, the static job concept no longer meets the needs of the organization and may even hinder its progress. Yet, only a third of global leaders said their organization was effectively working within distributed teams.⁵

To learn how Work Innovators are redesigning their workforce management practices to account for distributed work, please see our latest research on Reinventing Work.

Taskification

Taskification is the process of breaking a job into smaller and discrete tasks. Take for example Kelly’s job as a future of work researcher, which exists to produce data insights on which leaders can act. While she does engage in research tasks, much of Kelly’s job also consists of other tasks and projects like onboarding research vendors, providing input to our strategy teams, leading a team, writing, stakeholder management, and cross-organization collaboration.

Kelly is not alone in having a job that straddles multiple functions. Accelerated during the pandemic, organizations needed knowledge and frontline workers alike to develop as many adjacent skills as possible to meet the business world’s rapidly changing requirements. In other words, taskification has become commonplace out of necessity.

Taskification also allows technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and generative AI to take over tasks instead of entire jobs. For example, generative AI can do some of Kelly’s researcher tasks, but not all of them. It will be rare that generative AI will take over a job, but it is highly likely that generative AI will take over parts of a job. Accenture research estimates that about 40% of all employee’s working hours may be disrupted by AI.⁶

According to our crowd of experts, AI algorithms can be effectively used for taskification today. Once tasks have been identified, they can then be matched to candidates’ and existing workforce skill sets. We’ve seen the rise of internal talent intelligence platforms such as Eightfold and Gloat, which infer and identify organizational skill gaps and use AI to leverage individuals’ varied skills, passions, and experience in different functions. In addition, external talent platforms like Upwork are on the rise. Decades of workforce research⁷ show that when talent is matched with work based on their skills, workers are happier and more impactful, creative, and adaptable, which ultimately leads to performance gains for the business. These platforms also allow us to flexibly redeploy reliable and loyal workers as business needs shift.

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Skill-scaling and renewal

In telecommunications, multiplexing has been instrumental in growing global communication networks and sharing resources efficiently because it allows multiple signals to share a single channel. This is a great metaphor for leaders seeking to maximize their scarcest resource in today’s talent markets – skills. Multiplexing will become increasingly relevant as it facilitates the scaling of a single individual’s skills to an entire organization. For instance, multiplexing enables the fractional worker to contribute to different parts of the organization in succession and bring others along with them.

In Upwork research from 2018, 50% of full-time and contract workers reported working on just one job, project, or contract at any given time. In 2023, this number dropped to 37%, with 63% of U.S. workers saying they were currently working on multiple projects, contracts, or jobs.⁸

The widespread need to keep skills fresh and up to date is another driver of job disruption, for any scarce resource becomes more valuable when it can be renewed. Yet traditional job design leaves little room for growth and development. Upskilling, or teaching people additional skills that relate to their current roles, and reskilling, or teaching them skills to succeed in new roles, is a strategic imperative when, according to the Harvard Business Review in October 2023, the average half-life of skills is now less than five years.⁹

The freelance community offers a model example of skill renewal.¹⁰ Among Upwork talent, we see even greater renewal rates with younger workers, with 71% of Generation Z freelancers likely to have received AI skills training. This compares to 67% of millennial freelancers, 44% of Generation X freelancers, and 21% of boomer freelancers. And, the good news is, skill renewal is contagious and leads to skill-scaling because innovative workers who have learned new, essential skills can share them with colleagues. The benefits of skills renewal are likely to be even stronger among employees in organizations that can share new skills with colleagues. However, these innovative employees require their narrow job responsibilities to evolve to assist our organizations in this way.

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Generative AI

Upwork research¹¹ has shown that leaders are split on exactly what impact generative AI will have on job disruption: 42% of global leaders said generative AI is primarily an augmentation tool, while 58% said it is primarily an automation tool.

Despite any disconnect regarding its usage, 90% of global leaders said they will increase their workforce over the next 12 months because of generative AI, compared to only 10% who said they will decrease their workforce over the next 12 months. In addition, 54% of global leaders said generative AI is primarily an innovative technology to create new ways of doing things within their organizations rather than a tool to gain efficiencies by doing the same work, but faster. And this isn’t just leaders’ opinions. In a 2023 analysis of more than 19,000 tasks, a Harvard Business Review study found that more than half could leverage generative AI as an input to unleash creativity and enable novel solutions.¹²  

In considering what these numbers mean for job redesign, we know that previous AI applications mainly impacted jobs that were routine and based on a simple set of rules. But as generative AI grows capable of more and has a greater impact on the productivity of a wider swath of roles, we’ll need to rethink human participation in these roles. The question of “What can AI do that a human can’t?” links back to our discussion on taskification and become the cornerstone of all job redesign conversations.

Finally, we’re creating brand new roles that involve the oversight and management of AI labor. These are “jobs” that may not currently exist but will be essential because, as Alexandra is fond of saying, whenever you insert a piece of AI into a traditionally human-driven process, you need a human to create it, to manage it, to fix it when it breaks, to redeploy it, and then to explain to decision-makers how it works.

Getting started with job redesign

Getting ahead of these forces of job disruption by proactively redesigning your organization’s jobs may feel overwhelming at first, but mostly it’s a matter of aligning the skills and people you have with individual tasks. You might start with these five steps.

Create skills profiles. Gather a cross-functional group and talk about the roster of skills in your organization. Take stock of the work being done today, understand redundancies, and promote MVP (most valuable player) skills based on an analysis of the ones your working group has decided are in, out, and somewhere in between. Our Upwork Research found that more than one in four organizations today don’t have a process in place to identify and verify the skills within their workforce.¹³ This profiling process is critical to start by making skills visible within your workforce.

Re-architect job titles and descriptions. Many organizations have the habit of both underthinking and overusing the traditional job title and description. According to the Bersin Group’s Global Workforce Intelligence Project, only one in five companies write future-focused job descriptions.¹⁴ And, many job titles and descriptions are incorrect, out of date, or inconsistent with the work being done. Creating titles and descriptions that reflect specific core tasks will go a long way in clearing up the ambiguity and confusion in this arena. In addition, it can save both the worker and the organization from the misalignment of inaccurate or subpar job descriptions, resulting in missed career expectations and subsequently underperformance.

Create new job categories. As we’ve talked about, leaders are reporting needing more people, not fewer, due to new technologies like generative AI. We mentioned the various process points in which it’s advisable to keep a “human in the loop” as AI components take over more and more tasks. It may also make sense for you to create “superjobs,” which are a mashup of components from traditionally separate jobs and often have multi-department ownership. For example, in the legal industry, a “case synthesizer” might combine the jobs of database administrator (IT) and paralegal (core business) to examine legal precedents mined by an algorithm and handpick the most critical ones for the case at hand.

Drive upskilling at scale. Use talent intelligence technology to understand how long it takes for people at varying skill levels to complete a task and how much classroom content versus job experience is needed to do a task proficiently. If you can determine these details, you’ll know how to train a variety of workers in any given task. Then, you can develop a comprehensive learning and development formula for transitioning any type of current or new employee into a closely related role.

Be amenable to innovative reorganization. In the spirit of multiplexing, many companies are moving to agile models in which people work on project teams, switching areas of focus from one period to the next. Because it’s in an organization’s best interest for its people to be as broadly skilled and effective as possible, your organizational structure should support internal movement and the ability for individual contributors and teams to make decisions independently within a domain of expertise. From a cultural perspective, this is easier said than done; therefore, it may be useful to pilot a new organizational structure with a single department to start.

Case study: Taskification in action

A leading food and beverage company is taking the first step toward job redesign. The company started by redesigning marketing roles that were often staffed based on three-month project cycles, which were growing increasingly complex. A traditional job approach would be to assign a brand strategy director who takes on the full life cycle of a project, often leading to higher costs and time to complete. By taking a taskification approach to this traditional job, this company was able to identify five core competencies that make up this traditional job: brand concepts, brand positioning, identity system, brand guidelines, and creating videos. By making these key skills visible within the project, the company was able to use a work marketplace to hire talent based on these skills and tasks, rather than all the responsibilities listed in the job description. This new approach resulted in 62% time saved to complete the work and a 61% cost savings. In addition, it allowed for greater capacity and flexibility within the organization’s full-time workforce to continue to work on other projects that would have otherwise been delayed.

Conclusion

The need to disrupt the way we think about organizing work is necessary to usher in a new era of productivity, meaning, and value. Historically, the management discipline has often borrowed from the field of engineering to create controllable processes that work within well-defined jobs operating in fairly stable conditions. Today, we need to adopt a new playbook drawing from multiple disciplines, taking into account constant change. We must embrace job disruption and redesign so that people can likewise evolve to work alongside one of the most exciting technological advances of our time. An emphasis on tasks and skills rather than traditional jobs will create the agility required for twenty-first century success.

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¹ Wikistrat and Upwork conducted a three-part scenario planning simulation in May and June 2023 where the top drivers influencing talent were identified. These drivers were then used to create various scenarios that leaders may be faced with in the coming decade of work. Finally, participants were engaged in qualitative interviews to determine individual differences influencing each perspective on the future of work. The findings of nearly 100 pages of text resulting from these research efforts are synthesized here.

² Cathy Engelbert and John Hagel, “Radically open: Tom Friedman on jobs, learning and the future of work,” Deloitte Review, July 2017

³ Michael Schrage, Jeff Schwartz, David Kiron, Robin Jones, and Natasha Buckley, “Aligning Workforce Investment and Value Creation in the Digital Enterprise,” MIT Sloan Management Review, April 2020

⁴ Ken Ohler, PhD, “Fluid Teams are the Future of Work,” RADICL

⁵ Upwork Research Institute. Results reported from 1,000 global leaders surveyed in September 2023. Question: My company worldwide is effective in a distributed work environment. Strongly agreed results reported.

⁶ While we are optimistic on the future job gains from generative AI, research by Accenture and WEF suggest job and task disruption due to generative AI. To learn more, visit: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/05/jobs-lost-created-ai-gpt/.

⁷  In the 1970s, industrial and organizational psychologists began to study the theory of congruence, which showed that when a worker’s skills and competencies were in alignment with the job task, higher performance was obtained. The popular Person-Job role fit model was created and used throughout organizations. New academic research is evolving these theories to account for Person-Skill fit as the world of work evolves. To learn more, see: https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amp.2022.0024.

⁸ Upwork Research Institute Freelance Forward Survey, December 2023.

⁹ Jorge Tamayo, Leila Doumi, Sagar Goel, Orsolya Kovács-Ondrejkovic, and Raffaella Sadun,"Reskilling in the Age of AI," Harvard Business Review Magazine, September-October 2023.

¹⁰ Upwork Research Institute Freelance Forward Survey, December 2023.

¹¹ Upwork Research Institute. Results reported from 1,000 global leaders surveyed in September 2023.

¹² Bhaskar Ghosh, H. James Wilson, and Tomas Castagnino, “GenAI Will Change How We Design Jobs. Here’s How,” Harvard Business Review, December 2023.

¹³ Upwork Research Institute survey results from 1,400 U.S. business decision-makers. “Strongly agree” and “agree” responses reported.

¹⁴ The Bersin Group, Global Workforce Intelligence Project, 2022-23.