Three questions for Audrey Klieber, Director of Strategic Workforce Planning and Future Skills

Audrey Klieber. I can think of at least three main ones.

The first is artificial intelligence and its already perceptible impact on professions and associated skills.

The concrete effects on the workplace will start to be felt this year. First, there was an exploratory phase, with companies testing the tool, trying to assess its potential… Now we’re moving into something else. Take the example of call centers: AI is already as good as human operators. What tasks will AI perform? Low value-added tasks, no doubt, but not exclusively, that’s a certainty today.

Be that as it may, from a company’s point of view, use has become a regular, everyday occurrence. And they are beginning to take the measure of the changes that lie ahead – in the nature of work, in its organization, but also in the future evolution of the workforce – but we are not yet able to quantify them.

The second force at work is longer working hours. The last pension reform took us from 62 to 64 years of age, and we know that a new reform is due around 2028. We’re going to have to find new ways of working for employees who are going to have to work longer, especially those who have arduous jobs (working 3×8, night shifts, etc.) and won’t be able to make it to age 64 under these conditions. How do we support this last phase of working life? It’s a question that concerns both the substance of the work and its organization.

Finally, of course, we need to consider the country’s demographic evolution: we’re going to see massive waves of retirements that won’t be fully offset by new arrivals on the job market. This will lead to tensions in certain sectors and a shortage of strategic skills. In these conditions, how do we organize the passing of the baton from one generation to the next? How do we retain talent, build loyalty and create a strong employer brand? These are structural changes that we need to anticipate.

I’d like to add a fourth: the ecological transition, which will lead to the conversion of entire sectors of our economy, as in the case of the automotive industry, which has to switch from internal combustion to electric vehicles, calling for new skills. This is just one example, but it speaks for itself.

Audrey Klieber. Establish several tangible scenarios, objectivize and quantify the probable evolutions on this basis. In a word, anticipate.

Between the arrival of AI, longer working hours and demographics, profound mutations are telescoping. They all add up, making the equation extremely complex.

Anticipating and quantifying these changes is the key to avoiding stop-and-go phenomena, which are not only costly in economic terms, but also introduce tensions into organizations that are particularly damaging, even if they are difficult to measure.