 good morning Helsinki. I think the light show this morning gave the Beijing Olympics a run for their money. I'm gonna try that as a cure for jet lag moving forward. So we're here to talk about the future of work. A topic that I imagine is already starting to get tired. So rather than just talking about a set of tools they're gonna help people collaborate for remote teams, we're actually gonna talk about what's gonna happen a decade out. What will the future look like for an information worker in 2030? So I'm very fortunate to have two founders here who are gonna help shape that future. So Sophie Edelman as you heard from White Hat who is helping prepare individuals for this future of work outside of traditional institutions and I learned also her connection to Finland her husband is half Finnish. I'm very happy to have Kari here as well. I realize I've been mispronouncing his name when I heard him introduced earlier just a few moments ago who is the co-founder and CEO of Linear also natively Finn and happy to be he was one of the seed people involved in slush in the early days so happy to have him back here on stage and he's helping think through how future companies will build software in the future at his company Linear. So this is a topic that's very near and dear to my heart personally not only being involved with the company like Slack, building tools for the future of work but also in my past life when I worked at the White House during the Obama administration at the National Economic Council where we were thinking about how where the quality jobs will be in the future and how to train people for those jobs. So I want to talk today about the trends that will be impacting workers in 2030. So the first question I have for Sophie and Kari is what is the most contrarian idea you hold about the future of work and Sophie let's start with you. I think the most contrarian idea is really that university as a model is broken. We have this expectation now that everybody who wants to be successful go to university but the university is actually not preparing people for the future of work. People go to university now I think to get a credential it's seen as a rite of passage but it doesn't really give people the skills necessarily to be successful in the workplace and a lot of companies are finding they're still needing to train people once they actually hit the desk. So I think there's a mismatch there between what university is expected to do and what it actually does. It really acts as a passporting mechanism for people into work and it provides a whole host of other things besides but if you don't want to go down an academic path it doesn't seem to provide the skills you need to be successful. So are you saying that in 2030 fewer people will actually go to university? We're already starting to see that trend so I definitely believe that right now in the UK you're starting to see 50% of people going to university in the US it's about 70% go to university or community college. We're expecting that by 2030 that trend will see about 35% of people doing more of a work-based training rather than going to university and we expect that trend to start really accelerating over the next few years. You're starting to see that with the applications to the elite MBA program starting to fall over the last couple of years. So people are starting to recognize that the cost of university is not necessarily leading to the return on investment that they're expecting there. And how about you Kari? Most contrarian idea. Yeah so sorry. So it's loud. Yeah so I think like for me I think the most contrarian idea is and maybe it's just also my hope that the way we see offices and working at offices will not exist anymore. I think like it feels like the office should be the place where you do your best work and I think rarely it's the case anymore. People actually feel like they they don't have the time to do the work they want to do. They spend time on all kinds of other things that are are not as important that they like for their jobs. So I think like we actually I would hope to see that the model changes either towards more distributed or remote work situations or that the office environment changes so it's more like a workspace rather than what it is today. So more like a crafting place or like almost like an art out there or something where you make the things you want rather than like you spend time in meetings. So you think there will be less offices and more creative spaces in 2030. Yeah and I think it also like smaller offices. So I think like this huge offices what ends up happening is like the company ends up growing. You have a huge office then you now are in different floors and eventually you can get to different buildings and then the the buildings get distributed to different campuses and then eventually you're already like working in this remote way from other people. You're not actually necessarily meeting the people but you're still going to the office all the time. So like it feels to me that it what I would prefer is is place that it's a smaller place and I can work with people who are maybe have a similar tendencies than I do. Like it's more like we are all building stuff and we try to like have the focus around that. So it's more maybe work spaces or co-working spaces around like different crafts or different friends or different groups rather than like going to a company office. Fascinating. So fewer students going to university and then people meeting up who are not just with others in their company but people who share certain preferences or attributes and the types of things they want to create. Good. Good contrarian start. So Sophie looking at decade out. What will be different about how individuals prepare for their careers from how they think about it today. As if you think about today there's this expectation that you finish school and then you go and have this single shot of education at the beginning of your career. You might do three years. You might do five years. You get this kind of academic credential and that passports you into your your career and then it's kind of a linear experience. But that's not actually the reality of how things work today. People study really random things. I studied geography at university. I definitely don't use the formation of Oxbow Lakes and running a business. But that that experience really gave me a lot of things. It gave me access to a community and network that's been really valuable in finding my first job and getting on in my career. It's provided me friends and relationships that have been super valuable. And it's also it also helped me think more broadly about the world. But those things are not unique to university. And if you can replicate that in an apprenticeship system which is what we're trying to build an outstanding alternative to university by bringing people together from outside of their workplace and giving them training that's really applicable to their job and gives them the skills to be successful in their career then you can really create this alternative pathway. So in ten years time we really I really expect that a lot of people forego the university route if they don't want to go down academic path and you'll end up with pathways that are equally prestigious where people can go and either do training whilst they're working or academic learning and you can move between them. They're seen as you know equally prestigious. And you talked a little bit about how individuals will change their training and what will change from a company's perspective about how they're going to identify talent. You've kind of talked about forgotten talent and who's not being captured by the current model. I mean I think we talked a little bit as one of my favorite things about the SAT in the US was by having these kind of standardized tests you could get people outside of the boarding elite boarding schools on the east coast in a broader population and you could actually test them for aptitude and give them access to universities. So how do you think kind of companies will interview in the future? So it's company is already starting to remove the academic requirement for entry into a job. So I think that's a really positive step forward. So you're seeing Google and a lot of the big four accountancy firms and people like publishing houses actually say academic success does not correlate with work performance. We're seeing that again and again and in fact some of the big four accountancy firms ran studies on their apprenticeship scheme performance versus their graduate scheme performance. Not only did they find that their apprentices were more loyal and therefore retain longer but they actually outperformed in the job and on the professional exam. So we're starting to see real evidence of that. For companies what they're starting to do is look at competencies that indicate success. So they're looking for evidence of resilience, conscientiousness, interpersonal skills. They're looking for motivation and intent. These are all things that you can measure from somebody's prior experience without looking at their academics. And to your point I think one of the biggest determinants of somebody's success right now in terms of getting into the elite universities and then ultimately in their life is their parents' wealth. If you come from a wealthier family, you live in a wealthier neighborhood, you're more likely to attend better schools. I know in Finland you have fantastic free schools but in a lot of countries, the UK and the US particularly, there's a real differentiation between different schools. And what I think we're seeing increasingly is that you need to rebase people's academic performance against their school performance. You've got to look for academic outperformers, people who both have personal drive but also ability that's not reflective of the situation they've started at in life. And that's good for companies, right? Because every company out there is trying to now hire for diversity, whether that's through ethnicity or gender or socioeconomic diversity. And the only way you can do that is by fishing in a different pool. Yeah, I mean it's actually a very creative solution to inequality. I mean you reference this and I know in the US it's true that parents' income is becoming a stronger predictor of their child's income, the greatest data point to prove inequality. But kind of what you're talking about will obviously broaden the set of people who will get access to jobs and potentially the best policy measure to respond to growing inequality all over the world. See, I get to policy very quickly. Kari, you've worked at some of the greatest companies or new companies out there at Airbnb and Coinbase and have said that the joy seemed to have disappeared from some of the work, even at these innovative startups. So what is really broken and how could that be different in ten years? Yeah, I think like connecting back to what I said earlier about like the office as an environment, it hasn't really changed a lot in the last, I don't know, 50 years. I think like, yes, we have computers, but overall it's like the still same model. And I think like what's now happened when the companies have been scaling even faster, what happens is that there is not enough time maybe to build that kind of like the systems or the structures that the company needs. So what ends up happening is that like people have to like figure those things out on the fly often, which then means that that like generally like in the work, if you whatever professional you are, maybe you're a designer or engineer or a marketer or a salesperson, like a lot of your time goes to go to this like basically coordination alignment between the different people in a company. And I feel like a lot of people are feeling frustrated that they actually have great ideas to what to do. They could also execute with them like those ideas really well, but they can't because they don't have the time because most of their time goes into this kind of meta work, which is just like talking about what are we going to do rather than doing it. So I think like that I think a lot of people are starting to feel that kind of like frustration that I'm actually not feeling that this work is meaningful for me because like actually like I'm not seeing the outputs of the work. So I think like there what we and like what also in my company what we are trying to like figure out try to really be thoughtful about that like how can we structure the company so that it's clear how the project should be run and that like it's effective. Back at Airbnb and with this other I also at Coinbase that the main way for me to be successful with the projects was actually kind of push back on a lot of things and say that now I'm not going to come to this meeting and I'm going to decline or ask people do we really need 10 people in this meeting that or that if there's 10 stakeholders for this project I don't think there should be. I think there any project should have like one stakeholder or maybe two but if there's 10 people that are deciding about the project so I think that it's not like either none of them are stakeholders or one of them is but it's like I think usually what happens is that every every one of those 10 people will have a slightly different opinion and then that will like just kind of mess up with the project and the and the schedule. And do you think that will change by behavior change of people like you coming into organizations and saying no more meetings or will it be the tools that people use like how will we get to the kind of more efficient state in the future. Yeah I think like there needs to be some kind of change on overall like how we think about these things which is generally like how do we like I think like companies could be more observant on a way that they operate. I mean it's like a lot of I think a lot of things are so much obvious that like how they could operate better. I think the hard part is actually like people know like yes we should have less meetings but it's hard to enforce or it's hard to like systemize so so what some of the things what we're doing is we're trying to figure out some of those best ways like how what are the best ways to actually build software and like run the team so it's like efficient and people feel actually that they they feel meaningful that the work is meaningful with them. But I think like the way to do it is that it's to build this kind of like a platform or like a system that helps the companies and the management run the process rather than them running it themselves. So I think a lot of the management today is about you call to talk to this person and then you talk to this person and this person and you repeat the same things to everyone and that's what every like management like CEOs have to do. You just have to repeat everything which I think it could be much better if you have a system that okay we want to change the priorities I put it into this system now it's will kind of deploy to the organization or we want to say that okay now project should be actually focusing on this metric or this goal okay. Now it's great. The future has arrived. Yeah anyway so so so the project should focus on this goal I can like set it up into the system and then it will automatically like deploy to all people who are working on projects and like any new project that will be started will use that as a as the template. So got it. And back so VTU to talk about individuals that how will the career trajectory be different for Gen Z? Will I have one job? Will I have multiple jobs? You mentioned a little bit the difference about not an educational chapter and then a work chapter. What will it look like for that generation? Right I think I think we've already seen that trend with the millennial generation right people don't go in and have one job they don't have one career path they switch you know every two to four years and people need constant retraining I think the pace of change is so fast now with new technologies coming in that everyone always needs to upskill everyone always needs to be changing career paths and changing their skill sets so I actually think we'll have a system where people will always be learning will always be applying those skills so edge in fact everyone will be going through effectively an apprenticeship whether it's a formal apprenticeship or not whether that's in a digital tech or professional service career or in sort of more the traditional trades I think that's the system that we're moving towards and and I definitely I think that the for the Gen Z or Gen Z and they expect much more career fluidity we're seeing that they expect fluidity in everything right their identity whether that's gender or anything else they think about themselves in a much more fluid way and they also expect that with their career they they question why they can't move from being a digital marketer to being a software engineer to being a manager like why can't they make these moves to their their career and I think the answer is they can but interestingly because they are also the generation that grew up during the financial crisis they also crave stability so it's a funny you know tension there between identity fluidity and wanting career fluidity and stability and I think companies that can embrace that give people the opportunity to stay within an organization keep that stability of company but give them fluidity in terms of their career path by seeing potential harnessing that potential giving investing in them with training will actually reap huge dividends from from their employees so I think we're seeing a world where people may stay longer with a company but move more fluidly fluidly between different roles and have that constant training on a longer basis and what's exciting to me with the young people we work with at White Hat is we work primarily with people who at the start of their career people who are leaving school 16, 17, 18 to so 24, 25 and they're starting their their career path with this experience of simultaneous work and training so they're learning knowledge skills and behavior they're not going just doing an online course they're embedding those skills that they're learning in their work and so they they've never experienced anything different they don't think of work and education as being separate they expect to constantly be learning and I think if you embed that early that's actually a fundamental shift in the system and do you think it'll be apprenticeships at least as they are today is one chapter do you imagine someone will be doing multiple apprenticeships as they pivot throughout their career right we already see that I think apprenticeships are not limited to people at the beginning of their career and you will do these consecutive apprenticeships throughout your career so for example somebody might start doing a digital marketing apprenticeship for for a couple of years they build deep skills in that area but they realize that increasingly they're using data I mean everything involves data these days and we have to manipulate and crunch that data is becoming more and more challenging so then they would progress on to say doing data science and doing a data science apprenticeship and they would become the expert in that team who can use Python and R and do regression analysis and then they take on a team and they need to have management skills and so they'll go through a management training process rather than being shipped off for two years to do an MBA program they'll actually spend the time learning the skills applying those skills reflecting on those skills and fundamentally building their businesses to be better businesses I think the companies that embrace that will end up being much more productive and much more successful because investing in your employees and developing them is the best and cheapest way to create more a shareholder value thank you and Kari I think there will be a lot of people who want to be apprentices to you and how to build a more efficient kind of business so can you talk a little bit about how at linear you're working asynchronously and you get to build it as a founder a friend of from the ground up so how are you implementing some of this what the future of business should be like at linear yeah so so yeah like we even with the founding team now like we are now distributed between San Francisco New York and Helsinki so that's already like 10 hour time zone difference and that's that's like I think the main thing that people sometimes forget about remote work is that the time zones is the real problem it's like there's no fix to it really I mean people could switch their how they sleep and are awake but that's really hard but so what it needs to happen is to the only way to solve that problem is to try to move more of their work into asynchronous so that I think for example like rather than have a meeting like make a decision like write a document talk about it on the document then maybe have a meeting if it's needed and I think like this is already I think we also again like we know probably going to meetings it's often they are not productive if people don't prepare for it like for example Amazon they use this memo that you have to write before the meeting and then half of the meeting is actually reading the memo silent in silence and so that everyone is informed the same way and as much as everyone else and so I think like what we we are also trying to obviously we need to figure out no one has really figured out what it looks like so what we do is is we actually do do those calls few times a week just stay in touch but overall we set up the roadmap we we obviously talked to a lot of our customers like what what they need we set up some kind of roadmap we talked about the roadmap and then basically every every month or so we we look at this is the still the right way or is this these still the right priorities for the projects we someone owns the project and can write like a brief about it like this is the project and then we can like asynchronously like chat about it and then each week we will just like decide like that that week's priorities in in one basically we do it in our tool we do it before the meeting or before the call and in the call we can just like see if we just like if everything is okay everyone is aligned rest of the week we don't have to talk about it or like obviously we do but it's it's like everyone knows like this is the plan for this like 90 days this is a plan for the next 30 days this is a plan for the next seven days and so that's one way to to kind of I think what ends up happening a lot of companies it's like people are really reactive and I think that they're changing priorities every day and I think you shouldn't be changing priorities every day unless something is really on fire and then you should fix that but but other than that like if you're my if you change your mind every day it's like you're not gonna make a lot of progress it's basically like if you're trying to sail somewhere you're like you shouldn't oversteer like you need to like decide this is the path I'm gonna go and then you adjust it every now and then but if you keep oversteering you're gonna lose speed so I think like that's I think is the tendency that we want to avoid that can we build the company so that we we don't oversteer every day where we are going but we can have a reasonable time frames for for things this is what's fun to have a designer talking about how to manage very systems like approach I guess what to each of you what are you and your companies doing today that you think will be a trend that will extend kind of beyond tech to other sectors kind of over the next few years how are you setting the example so it's interesting that Kari was talking about so dog fooding his own tool we definitely dog food our own apprenticeships at White Hat we have a lot of apprentices on our team and I think it's at different levels to your point about people going through it at different ages and different points in their career we're already seeing that we over the next few years expect people to really start embracing this trend of investing in their people investing in their training and development putting them on these structured programs we work we work with tech companies for sure the Google's the Facebook's improbables of the world they take on apprentices and I think it's a great way for them to start bringing in new ideas into their businesses and really competent people but we also are working with with companies that you wouldn't expect outside who are also pioneering so the BP's the you know the publicist media some of the big music companies like Warner Music and Warner Brothers the law firms like Clifford Chance they're all embracing this trend of okay the world is changing the world has changed university doesn't provide us with the skills we need for FPP we're still having to train them so let's actually look at this again how are we going to make our team reflect our customer base how are we meant going to find the best and the brightest and the most ambitious people and they're really changing already the way that they they recruit the way they retain people the way they train people I think that is that is the big trend that's going to extend beyond the tech sector though it's great to see some of the leading lights of tech really driving that as pioneers it's exciting to know it's multi-sector already so the future is always I try to get ten years out and it's already these ideas are already happening Kari how about you is our what was that question the question is what are you doing today that you think will be replicated in other kind of industries like what how is linear implementing something that will be a part of the future I mean yeah I think I generally like I don't know it's linear one thing but I think the software and the technical industry is another thing I think overall I think one of the things in interesting in software industry is that and especially engineering is like you're building your own tools all the time so I think it hasn't really happened that much in a lot of other industries so I think like legal or or I mean I think they have tools but I think they're not like actively thinking about it though like how could this be better so I think like that that's like an approach that I would want to see more in different industries like should we actually like try to like figure out what is that what is kind of like I think like the best tools also describes some kind of workflow or a system so like if you have a company goals like we want to improve this thing or like generally this is the most important thing for us can we set up a system that isn't incentivized people to do that and like or that it's actually in the tool that like this is the right way to do it and that way also I think it's it's gonna help other people coming from the industry like new like recent grads or someone like or this these younger people coming to industry to understand like how things actually work because like you don't have to go ask this person like how do we do these kind of things so I think I just think that like overall the approach of like understanding and and trying to understand like your what is your company's system and then what would be the right tooling to to support that or improve that and like do we even have a system and and then like if that and like what if we don't then like what would the system look like so I think I just generally like having this like meta thinking of like what is our company's operating system kind of and then how can we keep improving it all the time listening to you both it occurs to me that this is all so fundamentally about talent how do we find the best talent how do we recruit them how do we continue to let that talent grow how do we build organizations to attract this kind of talent I mean I think one of the reasons that a lot of these companies are so good at attracting people is that they are innovating on the ways that we actually spend our time and achieve our priorities and I think again from the policy angle this is an opportunity for countries to think about you know can we have innovative policies around work contracts should we have apprenticeships in the US like how can we incentivize these remote teams to get up and running around the world instantly I think that's a real opportunity for governments to think about how to attract kind of the best of the best from all over so I hope everyone in the audience got a sense of what 2030 is going to look like from some of the people who are building that future so thank you both very much for the conversation thank you