Changing Work Organisation and Skill Requirements (Contributed Article‪)‬

Context How work is organised is one of the most important factors in determining what skills workers need to do their jobs successfully. Many analysts have argued that recent decades have seen the beginnings of a revolution in work organisation, a revolution that continues and will have ever widening effects in the workforce. No longer will workers be successful if they are able only to complete one small unchanging set of tasks in a workplace that puts together the work of many to produce goods or services. Instead, they will need to be far more flexible, able to fit productively into teams that are formed for specific work tasks or projects that may only be performed once. They will need a new range of skills to negotiate the new, much more changeable, communication-rich and customer-focused world of work. These broad images of change have been expressed in a myriad of ways, with a variety of emphases. They have become almost an article of faith when talking about the likely future of work and skill requirements, often providing the context for various claims. To take one example, a recent NCVER collection on 'generic skills' begins with the assertion that: