The Valley Industry Association hosted its 2024 Workforce Development Conference, “The Future of Work: Leading a Human-Centered Workplace,” at the Hyatt Regency Valencia on Thursday.
Jorge Marquez, chairman of the Los Angeles County Workforce Development Board, provided opening remarks before the live panel discussion, moderated by Ed Masterson, with local business owners, leaders and board members.
Gary Corona, DrinkPak general manager, Steve Youlios, owner and operator of Jersey Mike’s Subs, Dale Donohoe, CEO of Intertex General Contractors, Josh Abramson, founder of ALLBRiGHT Painting and Harriet Happel, dean of Career Education at College of the Canyons, addressed technological changes in business, such as the rapid growth of artificial intelligence.
With a changing world of new applications and methods of getting the job done quickly, the panelists focused on the soft skills and foundation students and employers will gain, despite the stigma of AI.
“What most people call soft skills, there’s nothing soft about them. They’re not even professional skills, they are essential skills to be a human in this world,” Happel said. “We call them the five C’s of essential skills. The first is creativity. A robot will never be creative. Only humans can create.”
The other four skills, according to Happel, include: critical thinking, communication, collaborations and comfort with uncertainty.
The event keynote speaker was Seth Mattison, who has “shared his insights with tens of thousands of business leaders around the globe… including [those from] Mastercard, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, The Dallas Cowboys, AT&T… The Walt Disney Company,” according to the event program.
Through Mattison’s presentation, “A Changing World,” he discussed the following four points:
- On the other side of an existential experience, our values changed and expectations shifted.
- We need more from people, not less, but we can no longer extract more.
- Digital commoditization is amplifying the need for human ingenuity.
- Leaders think they have to trade growth for humans, but the future is growth through humans.
Engaging the crowd with ways in which the world has evolved in recent years, most notably post-COVID-19, attendees answered with concepts such as remote work, cybertechnology and even inflation.
Mattison fixated on the ways in which COVID-19 changed the business world, along with the entire world, discussing the human element that is a result of asking deep questions during the pandemic, as well.
“Regardless of what news you were watching, they all ran the same ‘death ticker’ in the upper right hand corner as a constant reminder of your vulnerability, your existence,” Mattison said. “At the end of 2022, Oracle released data — they found that 93% of people said they reflected on their values over the past two and a half years.”
Discussing regenerative work, which Mattison states is the contrast between life affirming, versus life depleting, Mattison encouraged the use of AI as the key to less repetitive tasks and work-culture burnout.
Simultaneously, Mattison presented on the screen a quote stating: “In a world of AI parity, value creation becomes less about scale and more about soul.”
Clarifying the message, Mattison encouraged attendees to not take the message regarding AI the wrong way, but to be cognizant of the role of the human element.
“I want to leverage it to remove all of the low value, highly repetitive tasks, to free myself and my people up to do the work that only they can do,” Mattison said. “You will never replace the most human, deeply human stories, period, full stop…. I can either grow, push the business, or I can create a human-centered environment that takes care of people.”
