Employability and Industrial Mutations

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© ISTE Ltd 2022

The rights of Florent Noël and Géraldine Schmidt to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950756

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78630-743-9

While technological change is, at least potentially, a source of progress, it also brings its share of uncertainties and fragilities. This is true of their effects on employment. Industrial change has always had consequences in this area. At the level of nations, organizations and individuals, the difficulty is always to assess the scope of these changes and to prepare for them.

Industrial revolutions have followed one another with well-known consequences on the content of work and the volume of jobs. Today, the “digital revolution”, while giving rise to the hope of new jobs, also poses certain threats with the rise of automation and the emergence of artificial intelligence. A recent OECD report (2019) on employment prospects estimates that, in the next 20 years, 16.4% of French jobs will be threatened and 32.8% will undergo a radical transformation.

In a period marked by these major transformations, companies are therefore led to reflect, very early on, on the actions to be taken on human resources. Hence, the notion of employability is becoming central and cannot simply be left to the initiative of each worker and the State. Beyond the institutional injunction to be responsible for one’s own destiny, what does this notion of employability cover? What is its history? What issues does it address? What are the respective roles of public policies, managerial practices and individual actions? What can be said (and done) about unemployability? How can we meet the challenge of the digitalization of jobs? What are the levers for building employability?

This book, which brings together researchers from different specialties around these issues, aims to shed light on the current changes in work by addressing the theme of employability in all its complexity. I am proud to welcome it to this series.

Patrick GILBERT

Professor at IAE Paris-Sorbonne

Head of the series

“Technological Changes and Human Resources”

November 2021

1980s… 1990s… At the trade union level, the word employability was not acceptable. It was seen as a tool for the exclusive use of employers to organize terminations and support outplacement.

Today, the ability to be employed has become one of the major challenges for companies, so that employees can adapt to the internal and external changes taking place. The exponential digitalization of all work relations is one of the concrete illustrations of these changes.

The ability of human beings to adapt to changes in their work is, more than ever, a key element in the success of these transformations. However, sociological constraints remain and the initial suspicion is sometimes still present. Although significant efforts have been made in training to “nurture” and develop skills, this is not enough.

The initial mistrust will only disappear completely if firms help to set up work organizations that promote and develop the ability to be employed. This requires employers accepting, internally, a different distribution of powers, in order to free the initiative and the responsibility of the employees.

It is at the price of this “revolution” that the ability to be employed will gain the support of all the actors in the company. If the work organization parameter becomes a central element of the management method, adaptation to change could be more natural, because it is permanent.

Today, it is not enough to have good ideas. They must be shared. The conditions for employability must therefore be worked out in concert with the employees themselves and their representatives, through a permanent, high-quality social dialogue, which requires a number of prerequisites (trust, carrying out a shared inventory before any negotiations, etc.).

This joint work on employability in periods of major change will make the adaptation actions of companies more legitimate and acceptable, including in the event of restructuring: “I will be more confident about my future if I know that I have the ability to adapt to a new job”.

The Institution pour le progrès social dans l’industrie (IPSI) is a joint association whose founding members are the Groupement des entreprises sidérurgiques et métallurgiques (GESiM), on the one hand, and the trade unions CFTC, CFDT, CGT-FO and CFE-CGC, on the other hand.

The association’s main objectives are as follows:

– to contribute to the improvement of social, professional and strategic dialogues in companies;

– to promote a management by competencies, a management that is responsible, valorizing and a source of performance in the long-term;

– to contribute to all innovations and experiments in social matters;

– in a more global way, to take an interest in all subjects in the field of human resources (work organization, skills management, training, etc.).

Its operation is based on the exchange of experiences and joint sharing between HRDs, DAS and federal representatives of trade unions.

IPSI, in the wake of Think Tanks, also has a more operational vocation as a Do Tank: support, observation and capitalization of social experiments.

The company, as a cell of society, would thus have a better capacity to adapt to the evolution of its environment thanks to employees who, in the course of their duties, have permanently developed their own capacity to be employed in a context of constant change.

Xavier LE COQ

President of IPSI

President of the CFE-CGC Sidérurgie French National Iron and Steel Union

Jacques LAUVERGNE

Vice-President of IPSI, President of GESiM

Emmanuelle CHAPELIER

General Delegate of IPSI

November 2021

The Mutations – Anticipations – Innovations research chair at IAE Paris Sorbonne Business School has been structured for some 20 years in the form of a collective of researchers and economic actors (employers, trade unionists, consultants and experts) concerned with producing knowledge useful for action on the economic, technological, organizational and sociological changes that have an impact on employment and skills. Like this book, this network is open to a variety of disciplinary and institutional positions.

Since 2019, a partnership with the Institution paritaire pour le progrès social dans l’industrie (IPSI), a forum for dialogue and experimentation involving industrial employers and four representative trade unions (CFDT, CFE-CGC, CFTC and FO), has made it possible to extend the Chair’s discussions. It encourages the sharing of experiences and points of view, and the capitalization of knowledge necessary for collective learning within a joint observatory of industrial mutations. This book, the result of a research seminar organized in December 2019, is one of the milestones. Its ambition is to produce actionable knowledge by mobilizing research work firmly anchored in concrete situations to shed light on managerial decision-making on a practical issue: employability.