3 key workforce predictions for 2012 and how to prepare

Posted by: Joel Capperella

With the changing of the calendars comes a slew of fun to read blog posts and articles that offer predictions for the upcoming 12 months. But why is it that these projections typically never come to fruition?

Watching this scene from “Back to the Future” provides some insight as well as a guideline for making those beginning-of-the-new-year forecasts.

At the time this movie was released, the biggest laugh line in this clip was the one about Ronald Reagan being president. For Doc Brown, it naturally would have been unfathomable that Reagan, an established actor with a nearly 20-year career, would someday be the president of the United States.

Also note that Doc seems unfazed by the color photograph that Marty offers as proof that he is indeed from the future. It could be that Doc, who dismisses the photo as photographic fakery, was not impressed with the vibrancy and clarity of the color picture because, as a man of science, he was surely aware of the existence of color photography and naturally assumed that it was easily manipulated.

And herein lies the key to making reasonable predictions about the future. Advancements are not instantaneous and dramatic; something that does not exist today doesn’t miraculously exist tomorrow. Rather, the future is more a representation of today’s possibilities.

So, without further ado, here is what you can expect of the 2012 workforce:

1. There is at least one massive unforeseen event on the horizon. If someone had written in January 2008 that there was the chance of a massive economic meltdown that would dramatically affect the employment landscape, the prediction most likely would have appeared behind news about Iraq or Afghanistan. Such a prediction, however, would not have been too far a stretch. Economic indicators were indeed pointing to the possibility of some pretty rough economic waters. So in 2012, we predict that there is at least one major event coming that no one is thinking about today, and it will dramatically — either positively or negatively — impact the makeup of the U.S. workforce. A cop out you say? Perhaps, but the point is that in January, it is crucial to be prepared for both. A positive event means that your strategy for quickly ramping up the talent ranks in your organization must be well-oiled and ready to go. A delay in filling mission-critical positions one month could have dire consequences for the organization. A negative event means that any efficiency that has been established since the fall of 2008 must be placed into high gear to allow your company to continue to deliver against your goals, keep your employees engaged, and map out how to act after the storm passes.
2. Politicians will exploit good news and bad news. Expect an unemployment rate that dips below 8 percent by at least July of this year. Along with this, also expect that Democratic politicians will pound their chests and take responsibility for the improvement. Republican candidates will wring their hands over how slow the recovery is, and decry 8 percent unemployment as an unacceptable result of the current administration’s policies. For those of us who have to navigate these economic predictions and not just campaign on them, it will be extremely prudent in 2012 to be aggressively conservative with our workforce decisions. Oxymoronic? Not really. The point is that while the media and candidates are raising conflicting economic news up the flagpole, those that are building, managing, and leading a workforce of any type have to have all possible mechanisms for keeping the talent pool at the exact level that current and immediate market demand requires.
3. A Brit will light the Olympic torch. While many of us are not thinking about the Summer Olympics at the moment, the athletes that are preparing for them most certainly are. And there is most certainly some previously unknown (in the U.S.) British athlete with some sort of Olympic pedigree that will dramatically light the torch, declaring the 2012 Summer Games open. This is fact. It will happen, and I am proud to say that when looking back in December 2012, this particular prediction will be spot on. The workforce hook? There are obvious events that you are perhaps not thinking about right now that will most certainly come to fruition. Identify them, note the date on which they will occur, make sure that all necessary members of leaderships are poised to address the talent needs associated with them, and evaluate your ecosystem to ensure that it too is ready to handle these inevitable realities of your business operation.

There you have it, three predictions for the coming year and how to handle them when they happen. If you think that as predictions they are soft, I refer you back to Doc Brown and the reality of making predictions from the Hollywood perspective. After all, at the end of “Back to the Future,” Doc declares that roads will not be needed in the long-off distant future of … 2015.