Career aspirations today are radically changing. Fifteen years ago, big corporations were the ultimate prestigious go-to for graduates but now they are seriously losing appeal for many young talents. People today want to build careers on their own terms.

The widening gap between people’s aspirations and what most professional jobs offer is leading to an epidemic of dissatisfaction, especially among employees in big corporations. The Escape the City initiative that has been working with disillusioned employees for over 5 years tried to identify the underlying issues of professional disaffection and to get behind the drivers of the changing career aspirations. According to the study, a quarter of a million workers in the UK want to leave big corporations in favor of companies that are more aligned with their values. Accenture, Ernst & Young and PWC are the corporates that most respondents want to leave, whereas companies like Airbnb, Uber and Virgin Galactic are at the top of people’s employer wish list.

Source: Escape the City

But why is job dissatisfaction so high? And why does it culminate in big corporations like KPMG or Deloitte? The main issues that cause disaffection are the lack of personal freedom, a clear sense of purpose and a sense of positive social impact, worries about mental and physical health and the absence of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurialism at work. Half of the corporate employees that partook in the study feel that they cannot use their strengths or skills in their current jobs. Consequently, 54% cannot see themselves working in their organization in five years’ time.

Big corporations have failed to spot and catch up with the new ways of earning a living that are rapidly emerging. They still operate according to increasingly outdated paradigms that do not correspond to today’s working professionals’ values. The Escape the City survey admonishes corporates that their outdated attitude towards work is taking its toll on their image: “Perhaps, dear Corporates, you might wish to ask yourselves the questions that your employees are already answering: What is my purpose here? What difference am I making in the world? What positive mark will I leave behind after I’m gone? In a world where I could spend my days any way I choose — why should I spend them doing the work that I’m doing right now?”

It seems that big-named corporations have been living off old glory. Four of the top ten companies that workers want to escape are still to be found on the Times Top 100 Graduate Employers list, on which renowned corporations still hold 17 of the top 20 spots. While a host of talented graduates indeed flock to pursue a career within the corporate world, there is also a rapidly increasing movement away from the prestigious graduate schemes towards jobs in small businesses, start-ups and non-profit organizations. The growing importance of alternative careers is also highlighted by George Monbiot’s article in the Guardian warning students of entering a career in banking, finance or consulting rashly (How a Corporate Cult Captures and Destroys Our Best Graduates). There is indeed a trend of students moving away from these traditional career options; only 15% of Oxford graduates and 16% of Cambridge graduates now pursue finance and consultancy jobs when they leave university.

Furthermore, people’s aspirations to start their own business are increasing exponentially. Innovations in technology and communications make starting one’s own business easier and easier. And social media relentlessly celebrate every success, adventure and champagne moment creating ever higher entrepreneurial aspirations.

We find ourselves in a work revolution, in which the alignment of our own values and those of our workplace is becoming more and more important. JANZZ.jobs – the job platform that works like a dating site – provides an efficient means to find our exact match. Using the latest semantic technologies, it precisely matches profiles of job seekers, employers, freelancers and companies.

As cinematic representations of intelligent machines over the past decades have shown, the fascination with and the fear of artificial intelligence always inevitably mix. People enjoy the thrill of watching humans knocked off-balance by AI in Ex Machina, robots trying to take over the world in I Robot, or seeing an entire team of Marvel superheroes fighting Ultron in the latest Avengers movie. But also in real life, intelligent machines are rivalling with humans and many are afraid of automation and digitalization stealing away people’s jobs. Still, the quest for intelligent machines is relentless.

Thinking Robot — Image by © Blutgruppe/Corbis

Back in 1997 the Deep Blue computer picked grandmaster Garry Kasparov apart in a chess match. Three years ago, supercomputer Watson competed on Jeopardy! against two champions and defeated them by far. Now, Watson helps doctors make more accurate diagnoses using raw data from medical research and patient histories. In Japan, cuddly robot bears are hailed to be the future of elderly care. The ability to talk to one’s phone or tablet is not relegated to the imaginary space of films such as the science-fiction drama Her but is a reality. These and many more innovations in the field of artificial intelligence have profound implications for the relationship between man and machine.

Indeed, in our increasingly digitalized world with exponentially growing data volumes, complex issues are handled much more effectively by computers than by humans. Computers can process large volumes of data in a speed unattainable for humans. Not only is data increasing in volume but also in speed, variety and uncertainty. Most data is now supplied in unstructured forms such as images, videos, symbols and natural language – hence, computer systems needed to step up to the challenge in order to process this new kind of data. Cognitive computing aims to simulate human thought processes in a computerized model. Self-learning systems that use data mining, pattern recognition and natural language processing are trained to mimic the way the human brain works. Ultimately, cognitive computing strives to solve complex problems independently, without human assistance. According to Gartner, the era of cognitive computing, also called the smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of IT.

While AI capabilities such as natural language processing, speech recognition and machine learning algorithms were invented 30 years ago, it is only now that these technologies find significant application in business systems. More than 2’300 startups have been founded and venture capitalists have invested billions of dollars in the field of AI lately (a representation of the AI business landscape can be found here). Furthermore, major players like Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, SAS and Yahoo are investing in the development of smarter applications.

Why now? The exponential growth of unstructured data not only offered a challenge to computer systems but also an effective means to train machines. Big data, along with improvements in the above mentioned disciplines, is what’s making the difference in machine learning. Sophisticated algorithms can only learn to solve problems independently by repeated training using big data. The success of smart applications thus depends largely on the quality of data that they are fed.

In healthcare, the finance industry, e-commerce, customer relationship management and search engines, cognitive computing is employed in order to support human experts in making faster and more accurate decisions. While machines have thus replaced human work in many fields, especially where manual work is concerned, artificial intelligence does not supersede human experts but rather acts as a catalyst. Cognitive computing systems can amplify the possibilities of what either machines or humans could do on their own.

JANZZ.technology also supplies such a system in the field of employment, skills and talent. The ontology JANZZon! and the smart matching engine JANZZsme! make complex problems such as job and skills matching computable and completely change the way we think and go about job searching. As the applications of JANZZ.technology are structured semantically, that is, occupations, skills and qualifications etc. are interlinked logically; they can deliver meaningful results for complex searches for job vacancies, employees, freelancers etc. in real time, across multiple languages. Importantly, the applications are constantly fed with new data and therefore become more accurate over time. With the tools by JANZZ.technology, you don’t search for a job – you are found.

The high quality of JANZZ.technology’s tools stems from its specialization and expertise in occupation data. The ontology JANZZon! has been built with solid industry-specific expertise and years of experience in HR. Every day, a dedicated team of IT-supporters and engineers work on improving the quality and extent of the ontology JANZZon!. A myriad of connections between occupations, skills and other data stored in the knowledge base is established continuously – like synapses in a human brain – turning the unstructured occupation data into structured data. Big data is turned into smart data. The gist: Cognitive computing tools are only ever as good as the expertise of their human creators. Also the success of the supercomputers Deep Blue and Watson may be explained by looking at the specificity and quality of their training. Both were built for one particular purpose, to play chess and to compete in Jeopardy!. Also in a later stage, Watson needed to be fed with a wealth of medical research and patient histories in order to be able to supply doctors with accurate treatments. The assumption that smart applications are superhuman all-rounders is thus vehemently inaccurate.

The only ones to fear the rise of cognitive systems are those who perform menial tasks. Sure, cognitive systems can process volumes of information in real time that we couldn’t even dream of but they need to be nurtured by human experts in order to perform accurately. Hence, HR cracks and doctors need not fear their digital supporters but rather welcome their disruptive and amplifying potential.

The lack of graduate jobs in the UK and the subsequent un- and underemployment of university leavers have been decried for years. New research now reports that over-qualification has reached saturation point, with woeful impacts on the UK economy.

According to a report commissioned by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), more than half the UK’s graduates are wasting their degrees in jobs that do not require a university qualification and are thereby driving lower skilled workers out of their jobs. Furthermore, the authors warn that the money invested in education is wasted, leaving young people crippled by debt as they enter an increasingly competitive labor market. Importantly, the discrepancy between the qualifications and skills of university leavers and those needed by the labor market has severe macroeconomic impacts, as it affects economic competitiveness and growth negatively, increases unemployment, undermines social inclusion, and generates significant economic and social costs.

“The assumption that we will transition to a more productive, higher-value, higher-skilled economy just by increasing the conveyor belt of graduates is proven to be flawed,” said CIPD chief executive Peter Cheese. “Simply increasing the qualification level of individuals going into a job does not typically result in the skill required to do the job being enhanced – in many cases that skills premium, if it exists at all, is simply wasted. This situation is unsustainable given that the government estimates that 45% of university graduates will not earn enough to repay their student loans.”

Indeed, the UK is trailing behind other European countries, leaving only Greece and Estonia with a higher underemployment rate. While countries such as Germany, Switzerland or Slovenia have underemployment rates of around 10%, a staggering 58.8% of students in the UK are not using the qualifications from their degree. The findings of the CIPD are supported by a claim from the Office for National Statistics in 2013 that half of recent graduates in the UK were in non-graduate jobs.

Graduates in non-graduate jobs, 2004 and 2010. The CIPD report noted a rise of underemployment in most European countries. Illustration: European Social Survey

In order to improve the bleak outlooks of graduates, the CIPD suggests raising the profile of alternatives to a degree such as apprenticeships and re-evaluating how employers invest in further training. The report thus applies a Malthusian logic to the issue of over-qualification, arguing that young people should rather pursue alternatives to a university education as the demand for skilled work on the UK labor market is saturated. Indeed countries, such as Switzerland, with a dual education system that fosters apprenticeships and other alternative educations perform significantly better in terms of matching qualifications with labor market demands.

The UK’s poor record is thus only the latest evidence of the skills mismatch and labor market frictions across Europe – a phenomenon investigated in the Nobel Prize winning research of Diamond, Mortensen and Pissarides. On the basis of this research, JANZZ.technology has developed a practical tool to recognize discrepancies between labor market demands and skills supplied by workers. Its solutions thus offer an effective way of gaining the necessary information in order to get better value out of an education system and to increase an economy’s productivity. As the CIPD has recognized, better information about degrees and their prospects might just be the first step to recovery.

The Institute for the Future (IFTF) has recently published a study about the most important work skills for the future. Yet, those who expect to find a guideline will be disappointed.

Due to the rapidly changing demands of the labor market, the study has found that foresight and adaptability will be the key to success. The top ten skills for 2020 listed by the IFTF therefore contain abilities like “sense-making”, “transdisciplinarity” or “novel and adaptive thinking” (see graphic below). What sound like the predictions of a horoscope, which will prove true no matter what, is actually symptomatic of the driving forces behind the increasingly automatized and interconnected work force.

Indeed the changing demographic, the rise of smart machines and new media, the progressive globalization and the changing structures of organizations are causing disruptions in the labor market that oblige individuals and organizations to rethink the way they approach career paths. As machines replace humans in an increasing number of tasks, and augment them in others, humans need to find what they are uniquely good at and what makes them indispensable.

While the study might for many parts be preaching to the converted, it is nevertheless interesting to read it as a symptom of the changing attitude towards work. The study reflects the decline of a rigid occupation image that is increasingly substituted by freelancing, working in projects, job sharing and of course a great variety of career opportunities. The key statements of the IFTF anticipating an even more flexible and fluid job market for the future reverberate with the reality as we already know it.

We find ourselves in world of skills rather than jobs. Therefore, finding the right job opportunities for one’s skill set becomes more and more important. As the job platform JANZZ.jobs matches skills with occupations and projects, it is the ideal means to connect individuals with the right work opportunities and to help them reassess the skills they need or discover possible career paths. JANZZ.jobs contains all the skills of the world.