It's been ages since I have had a new entry in the extremely popular 'Job Titles of the Future' series, but over the weekend I came across an interesting report from tech consultancy Cognizant titled '21 Jobs of the Future: A Guide to Getting - and Staying - Employed Over the Next 10 Years'that more or less has the next 21 posts in this series all in one report. With so much interesting source material (thanks Cognizant!), I had to bust out a new post for the series.
Then entire report is really interesting, and I imagine I am going to re-visit it again for future installments, but I thought today I would call out one really interesting future job from the list of 21 - a job that I can see playing a large role in the future of work and too, the future of HR.
The job title of interest is 'Man-Machine Teaming Manager' and I will share some details from the 'job description' for this theoretical role as laid out by our pals at Cognizant.
The key task for this role is developing an interaction system through which humans and machines mutually communicate their capabilities, goals and intentions, and devising a task planning system for human-machine collaboration. The end goal is to create augmented hybrid teams that generate better business outcomes through human-machine collaboration.
As a man-machine teaming manager, you will identify tasks, processes, systems and experiences that can be upgraded by newly available technologies and imagine new approaches, skills, interactions and constructs. You will define roles and responsibilities and set the rules for how machines and workers should coordinate to accomplish a task. This involves designing flexible experiences that meet workers’ expectations, while providing a simple and intuitive interaction with machines (translating consumer behavior to business users, as well as to machines, for instance). Ideal candidates will be passionate about advancing human-robot cooperation strategies in a dynamic business environment.
Lots of the more enlightened 'robots are taking away the jobs' commentary and predictions have arrived at a similar conclusion, that the future of work will be much more about people and robots/machines/algorithms working together, with each contributing their unique and hard to copy strengths. If you did in to the job responsibilities for the Man-Machine Teaming Manager role, (and kudos to Cognizant for writing this report in the form of a bunch of new-age job adverts), the first one talks about the manager needing to identify and describe the business functions and capabilities that are uniquely possessed by people and the ones that would be better performed by machines.
It seems to me, if you took this conceptual job, and instead of 'people' and 'machines' being the groups that the manager had to better combine as teams and collaborators, and just described it in today's terms of cross-functional teams of people, then in many ways you would be describing the role of an HR leader or Chief Talent Officer.
Figuring out strengths, capabilities, gaps, and the best ways for diverse groups of talent to combine and connect and collaborate in order to achieve desired business outcomes seems to be one of the most important roles in any organization, and one that should be owned and championed by HR and Talent leaders. So if the Cognizant report is right, and I have no reason to nay say it, then in the near future more of the talent and the collaborators will be some form of technology or robots or algorithms.
That doesn't change the essential need, purpose, and importance of the role - organizations need leaders that can assess, understand, support, and put in place systems and processes that enable all the talent in the organization to work together to produce the best possible outcomes.
Hopefully, that role will be filled by people for some time to come.
Hopefully, they will be HR people.
Have a great week!