Module 2: Did You Know? Shift Happens 2016

If you haven't stumbled upon the video series Did You Know? Shift Happens you should definitely check it out. The five videos show interesting facts and the progression of information technology researched by Karl Fisch and updated by various other contributors.

This is the link to version 5, updated in  2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqZiIO0YI7Y

1.  What trends/facts surprised you?

While all the facts and figures were mesmerizing to me, my real takeaways were:

• The sheer size of china and India in terms of their population numbers. For every baby born in the US, four are born in China and nearly six in India
• We are currently preparing students for jobs that haven't been created yet.  This underscores the importance of teaching, and coaching for critical thinking skills and problem solving, over wrote memorization. 

2.  Given the trends/facts presented in the video, what can we do as HR professionals to adapt to the changing environment of our businesses?

Never ever let ourselves fall behind in technology.  As a profession, we have some catching up to do in this area already.  Technology training requirements for HR professionals need to be increased and continuous.  

HR as a "portal" may seem cold and impersonal, but youth today have a much higher tolerance for, and, a greater comfort level with, portals than prior generations.  Some may in fact prefer them over waiting for an actual human to respond to their questions and prefer the freedom of entering portals and completing tasks on their own time frames.

Embrace cultural diversity.  If the top 25% of China and the top 28% of India is greater than the entire North America population, then not recruiting this candidate pool would be a lost opportunity to fill knowledge gaps.