Isabelle Rouhan: “You don’t own your job, but you are responsible and accountable for your skills”

Isabelle Rouhan (EDHEC Master 1997) is a recruiter, a podcast host, the author of two books (Les Métiers du futur and Emploi 4.0), a columnist, a member of the EDHEC Alumni board of trustees since January, co-founder and president of a think tank, and that’s not all! She has built a reputation by exploring the professions of the future, and the different targets that these activities will involve. Her aim is to positively document the technological shifts taking place in society and accompany as many people as possible with a virtuous vision of work. EDHEC Alumni caught up with Isabelle to discuss the professional world of the future. 

How would you summarise your different roles?

I dedicate two-thirds of my time to Colibri Talent, a recruitment firm I founded for top executives in the tech and data industries, and at the same time I’m involved in editorial activities and forecasting in relation to the world of work going forward. I’m also a member of several inter-professional associations in which I tackle subjects relating to professions, work, skills and transition. Finally I work as a volunteer civic reservist for the HR department of the French ground forces. There is a common thread running through all this linked to the transformation of jobs. Headhunting is the cornerstone of my economic model as the head of a business; content creation is more about generating visibility and influence. 

In your two books, you talk about technological evolutions while retaining your profound faith in people ...

That’s right, my books show how the transformation of work and professional skills, mainly due to automation, can herald a brighter future for our jobs, for us and for our children. The idea here is absolutely not that machines will replace humans, but that on the contrary we complement each other. A task that is automated is one that is repetitive, and quite often a chore. The fact that there are no more ticket collectors or fewer blacksmiths is not in itself a problem; the real issue is about protecting people and not necessarily professions. I’m convinced that anyone can change their job if given the right support. And in any case no-one will be doing the same job for their whole life. Personally, at the age of 46 I’ve already had seven different ones!

Does this transformation of professions call into question the management system used in many companies?

Absolutely, especially those that are too slow. And it’s in that respect that the “quick and dirty” or “better done than perfect” start-up culture can be seen as positive. Of course this is easier with code than with industrial objects, but from an organizational perspective, the bigger the company the lengthier its processes. And the lengthier a process is, the more it consumes human energy to feed itself. It is often middle management that is most reticent to change, because they can struggle to match objectives quickly enough. In general, top executives know which direction they want to take. But middle management needs to be reassured and brought on board. 

Can we expect greater collaboration in the working world of the future, with delegation to robots?

Very much so, and that means educating robots and algorithms. What are we willing to delegate to a machine, and to what end? Which data do we use to feed an algorithm? Must it always be explicable? These are questions that must be brought to bear on the very definition of ethics when it comes to robots. The director of the university hospital in Montréal, for example, gave robots the task of pushing gurneys around the building. This meant eliminating the job of attendants, but not the attendants themselves. He reconverted around 5% of them to ensure quality control of the robots, and invited the remaining 95% to become logisticians, distributing on the different floors the items transported by the robots, a task previously carried out by the orderlies and nurses. This made more time available for these carers, something that was desperately needed. His success indicator is not only profitability, but patient recovery rates and discharge times, both of which improved. Each industrial revolution created more jobs than it destroyed. A study by Eurostat has demonstrated that by 2025, digital technology will have created 15 million jobs in Europe, having destroyed 6 million. What is important is accompanying those 6 million people towards a career change within their employment zone, because there is also a geographic dimension. 

Do you think robots will make the horizontalization efforts made by companies in recent years last longer?

I don’t think there is less hierarchy now than in the past. In young companies, start-ups and tech, there is. In companies listed on the CAC40 and SBF 120 with a longer history, many layers persist, and there is less agility, whatever one might say. But I do think that the issue is not necessarily horizontality, but governance, because decisions and performance indicators come from the top. In my discussions with senior executives, I often advocate the 3 Ps (People, Profit and Planet, in that order): staff, clients, stakeholders and suppliers above all; profit, because companies need to build sustainable growth; and the planet because there is an urgent need to decarbonise the economy. We need fewer people in the automotive industry and the construction of new housing than we do in the renovation of housing, farming or the green transition. To transfer talent from one to the other, the idea is to determine where the needs lie. 

Are companies ready to hire people undergoing a career change, far removed from their initial role?

The answer is yes in professions under “strain”. In a profession with many candidates, it’s the most qualified, educated and experienced who are chosen. Each year in France 80,000 jobs in the digital sector go unfilled, and there is a shortfall of 900,000 coders across Europe. For these positions, top executives are willing to hire people undergoing a career change, as long as they’re competent and enthusiastic. There is a need for constant alignment between what you know how to do well, what you enjoy doing, and where the market lies, bearing in mind that the market and needs are forever evolving. You can’t be good your whole life in the same area, you can train for something new, I’m a typical example of this. I worked for 20 years in marketing and communication, and now I’m in recruitment and forecasting. EDHEC graduates have a highly entrepreneurial culture – after all they’re from a school founded by and for entrepreneurs – and an extremely robust network. 

For 85% of people in initial training nowadays, the job they’ll be doing in 2035 doesn’t exist yet. Are professions changing at the same rate as skills?

Ultimately, a profession is above all a portfolio of skills. To move from one profession to another, you need to consider the skills – both hard and soft – that are common to the two, and those you’re lacking in order to practice your target profession. Hard skills used to last 20 years in the 1970s. People had a diploma, a label and a relatively linear career, with perhaps a change in direction halfway through. Nowadays, a technical skill lasts between 12 and 18 months. You can no longer capitalise on these skills, you need to continue training throughout your life. Soft skills, which cover leadership, teamwork, public speaking, the ability to break down information, and agility in a shifting environment, mature with time. Having an outward-looking perspective is also a bonus, so one has every interest in mixing the generations in the working world. 

How can we raise awareness of this phenomenon of accelerated obsolescence as early as secondary education?

First of all, secondary school pupils and their parents need to be reassured. The internship done around the age of 15 is absolutely fantastic. What I believe in is the notion of “living your life” – real experiences. If you want to be a florist, go see your local florist and spend a week with them to understand that they spend most of the time with their hands in buckets of water being pricked by rose thorns. If you want to be a pastry chef, you need to be willing to make several hundred bases for tarts every morning, it’s not the same thing as your Sunday home baking. But social inequality is unfortunately still rife. It is easier to come out from your shell when you have a well-connected network, especially when you consider that 15 year olds often find an internship through their parents’ network. It is worth noting that according to the OECD, to move up from the bottom 10% in terms of revenue to the median revenue in France takes 6 generations. It’s one of the worst-performing countries in the OECD. The second complexity is that as long as maths remains a speciality in the school curriculum, as long as 30% of secondary school pupils leave maths behind as they enter their second last year, we will have a huge problem steering young people towards digital professions, which have a strong focus on science. 

So is your mission at Colibri Talent to “read” into the experience of top executives to visualise the kind of positions they might hold in the future?

I listen to them so I can understand their needs, which I then compare against a job description; if their skills don’t match, we consider the option of professional mobility. That’s where the recruitment dimension complements the forecasting dimension: I talk to people, I hand them the microphone during my podcasts, I conduct interviews when writing books ... I’m not exactly reading tea leaves! I like the fact that my intuitions face the realities on the ground and that these two worlds encounter one another. Start-up entrepreneurs, researchers, business leaders or military personnel can have very different visions, yet converge on certain issues. The Armed Forces, with which I have been heavily involved offering skills support in recent years, is the only institution that forces you to change job every 2 or 3 years. And they manage to do it with 200,000 people, thanks to continuous education. Throughout their career, military personnel can spend between 5 and 8 years in training. So it is possible and can be achieved on an industrial scale. It’s easier to retrain when you’ve got a project you believe in. We must facilitate soft transitions so people can reconvert throughout their lives to avoid situations where they are “written off” or dismissed because their job has disappeared. You don’t own your job, but you are responsible and accountable for your skills. You have to anticipate the next move, it’s an ongoing process of construction.

Les Métiers du futur (2019) is published by Éditions First.

Emploi 4.0 (2021) is published by Éditions Atlande.

To contact Isabelle: on LinkedIn or by email (isabelle.rouhan@gmail.com)