Historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his book 21 lessons for the 21st century that Human beings think in terms of stories rather than facts, numbers, or equations.  This is why it is important to understand the labor market in terms of stories.  My first few weeks of client conversations and client visits led me to believe that the following labor market stories are in play and may be helpful in your planning.

• Companies are curious about relooking at the Job Catalogue.  This is consistent with Constrained Optimization theories, where if we have a manageable number of jobs, the costs will therefore be optimized
• When I spoke to a few executives of the companies that recently went through a reduction in the workforce, they believed that the Job Descriptions of what the team members were doing were long outdated.  As a result, a few believe that incorrect decisions could have been made.  A few signals validating this aspect are companies calling back some resources by the tech companies.  Should we use a big data model to update responsibilities dynamically?- An executive asked.  A good product idea, maybe with the advancement in OpenAI, is certainly possible. 
• Similarly, there is more desire to map the skills adjacencies.  Are some people in the system who could be more valuable because of skills adjacencies?  Can we target that Java Developer and use it in the much-constrained aspect of Salesforce Development
• There were also a few questions about the Mobile and IoT stack skill sets.  This combination is expected to open more opportunities
• Global locations in India, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, and Mexico dominated the conversations.  But we also get requests around smaller places such as the Balkans for analysis, especially if the companies know they may not grow aggressively in the next 18 months.  This dynamic opens up a plethora of domestic and global locations for evaluations
• Mapping available free courses and aligning that to targeted job roles is another topic of interest as it involves cost savings towards paid courses.  Also, sometimes the paid courses are higher in quality in certain new avenues
• The need for all the critical functions, Strategic Workforce Planning, Recruitment, and Organization Development to all work in sync is more important now than ever before
• For one HR executive, we built a goal-seek model to show which locations in the footprint would be more optimal within their footprint.  This could be helpful for you when you are planning headcount across the locations
• Metaverse is another topic that has gathered significant interest where new roles are expected to emerge, but executives are hungry for more information on the specific use cases as this is still evolving
• There were some questions about executing mature functions in finance from different places in Latin America.  Here is a snapshot of the modeler we developed for this.  If there is more interest in this, please let us know, and we can share more details

• In a couple of conversations, strategies around gig work came into discussion.  Here are the top skill areas for Gig Work.  Having a placeholder for Gig Work in your workforce planning will be very helpful

• The shared services hubs in Asia are also emerging faster.  This allows evaluating the complexity of work done in these centers