In these pandemic times, we have colossal work and workforce issues: many more people are unemployed and a substantial economic pressure on companies will suppress hiring.

At the same time the scale of the required replacement and reskilling processes is enormous: According to the World Economic Forum at least 54% of all employees will need reskilling and upskilling by 2022. Due to the corona virus outbreak this number will very likely increase even more.

What will also be observed is a permanent increase in working-from-home models, with more and more employees demanding home office. According to a survey by the Australian community platform Airtasker, productivity is on the rise in the home office with remote employees working 1.4 more days more per month than their office-based counterparts. This results in more than three additional weeks of work per year.

Although productivity does not seem to be the problem, employee engagement and satisfaction in a dispersed work environment could become one. The current challenges for companies to reskill their workers as well as making sure people are working remotely successfully, offers exciting opportunities for startups: 

1. Matchmaking. One market opportunity is matching job seekers with the work that’s available. Tandemploy, for example, offers a job-matching tool which finds employees within a company that suit open vacancies.  
   

2. Reskilling. According to Mercer's 2020 Global Talent Trends Study, 98 percent of executives are planning to redesign their companies to make them fit for the future. Many of them also think that the technological transformation will be a business disruptor. So there is an enormous opportunity for starting a business in education and reskilling the workforce. 
   

3. Connecting. Software-as-a-Service applications can be sold and implemented without physical contact, have the highest potential and can be scaled easily compared to the struggle in the physical world. These tools offer an excellent way to connect workforces in all their different locations. The predicted market volume for SaaS-applications is at $94.9 billion by 2022, according to the market research company BCC research. 
   

4. Re-Humanizing. Artificial intelligence can be used to test people for their capabilities and match them with opportunities for work or reskilling as well as let people find jobs they genuinely like and do what they do best, putting human talent back into the core of employment and creating more value for the entire system. AI guru Kai-Fu Lee expects that 40 to 50 percent of all jobs will be automated by AI within 15 years.
   

5. Understanding. AI can help understand workforce engagement. In these pandemic times, with fear of illness, losing one's livelihood and working from home, workforce engagement can drop dramatically. And engagement is the key driver for successful organizations, as a research by Glassdoor showed.  

To put it in a nutshell 

Great ideas are born in a down market. Never before have the access to free online resources been so ample. These are amazing times for entrepreneurs who are offered a gigantic new market overnight to be disrupted. 

The market for workforce tools is relatively limited exploited and was not prepared for this moment in time. It is one of the markets where high social impact goes hand-in-hand with high margin and high growth.

Listen to Guido's input about the future of work at our Bits Live event:

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