Innovation and the new workforce

I'm keynoting the annual IHRIM (International Human Resource Information Management) professional association in about an hour here in Houston, TX; I'll have an audience of about 1,000 or so.

My talk today broadly revolves around the issue of "what's happening with our workforce." I'm taking the audience on a tour of the key drivers which impact organizations today, whether business or government,

• velocity: business is just plain fast, and our workforce must cope with that
  
• change capacity: there's a big disconnect in how quickly some people can deal with rapid change compared to others
  
• idea instantaneity: we're in a new world in which ideas or issues can quickly speed out of control, or work to our advantage
  
• knowledgeability: in which global insight is increasing at a furious pace, leading to ever larger pools of knowledge
  
• innovation opportunity: such rates of discovery lead to massive new opportunities with bringing new products and services to market
  
• idea discovery: our interconnected world now allows unique ideas to gain a global audience in a flash
  
• consumer spontaneity: the low attention span consumer is fleeting when it comes to loyalty to brand
  
• business intensity: operational excellence is the name of the game, given an economy which simply runs "fast"
  
• skills availability: all these trends that it is going to be more difficult to access skills
  

My key point for the audience: When we are thinking about deployment of skills , we must be thinking about:

• Attracting the right skills …… at the right time … for the right purpose
  
• Providing for business flexibility in a time of rapid change
  
• Establishing a constantly shifting, evolving “workforce on demand”
  
• Enabling this with sophisticated tools, infrastructure and skills access capabilities – managed by folks such as the IHRIM
  

These are issues I've covered extensively in my analysis, Critical Trends: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills here