The Future of Work
We can expect many changes to the way we work in the future. Technology has already had a huge impact on the modern world of work, and we can expect the paradigm shifts to continue. A job for life has already given way to portfolio careers - building transferable skills as you move from one role to another - and mobile technology has given rise to the gig economy.
But where are we headed? Will AI take over traditionally human roles? Will offices be a thing of the past?
Hear from our panel of academic experts as they offer their insights into what the future holds, and how best you can navigate this changing landscape.
Panellists
Professor Jeff Borland
Jeff Borland is Truby Williams Professor of Economics at the University of Melbourne. His main research interests are analysis of labour markets in Australia, program and policy evaluation and design, and Australian economic history. Jeff is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and in 2010 he was the Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. In 2018 he was a member of the expert panel appointed by the Commonwealth Minister for Jobs and Small Business to review the employment services system in Australia.
Professor Karin Verspoor
Karen is the Deputy Head of the School of Computing and Information Systems and Deputy Director of the Health and Biomedical Informatics Centre. She has a background in computational linguistics, which aims to build software that tries to "understand" the meaning conveyed by text at some level, sometimes called natural language processing or natural language understanding. Her research has focused primarily in the interaction of linguistic processing with world knowledge, and the implications that this has for the representation of knowledge. Her current research is focused on building tools to support biological discovery and clinical decision support, specifically working on methods that enable the use of the biomedical literature for improving biomedical data analysis. Before her work at the University of Melbourne, Principal Researcher at National ICT Australia's Victoria Research Lab.
Associate Professor Leah Ruppanner
Leah works in the School of Social and Political Sciences, and is an expert on family, gender and work. Her work focuses on barriers to maternal employment, female representation in government and gender inequality in the home. She is an expert in family, gender, public policy, cross-national research and quantitative methods, and works to understand why gender inequality in family and work continues to be prevalent and which policy contexts are best at alleviating some of this inequality and supporting working families. She has been featured in the Washington Post, Guardian and Slate.
Professor Simon Bell
Simon is a Professor of Marketing and Head of MSPACE, the Melbourne School of Professional and Continuing Education. He is also a Fellow of the Judge Business School at Cambridge University and a Fellow of the Australian Marketing Institute. He has worked extensively with industry in a research, consulting, and executive education capacity, and he writes and consults on issues including front-line employee performance, customer education and loyalty, and service innovation. His research has focused on the services, healthcare and retail industries and has been published in leading journals such as the Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review.