Last week was again Future staff at which Best of HR – Berufebilder.de® Also media partner is: Prominent speakers, old and new trends were to be found. A review - and a preview on 2018.

{Event} Trends from the future of human resources & outlook for 2018: Robot recruiting, corporate health & lifelong learning
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The Zukunft Personal in Cologne is Europe's largest trade fair for human resource management. The range of topics ranges from Recruiting and personal services over operational Further Training, Leadership and labor law to HR software and the future of Working world. And that is also reflected in the figures: five percent growth was recorded for both trade visitors (17.809 this year) and exhibitors (770 this year).

And the innovation potential is also growing. The number of exhibiting start-ups this year rose to 97, which is almost twice as many compared to the previous year. And not only that the start-ups took up more space this year, this spirit, one might almost call it hype, was suddenly palpable everywhere at the otherwise somewhat sleepy trade fair.

Influencer hype in the HR

For example also in the Networking and blogger lounge. Last year, it was more likely to be found on the outskirts of the trade fair, in a rather remote corner - and at least well suited for discussions. This year she was right in the middle of the action and the run on the lectures by the HR blogger scene was correspondingly large - one might think that there was almost more going on here than with the official keywords. And unfortunately the space was a little too small for such a crowd. That's almost a bit like the influencer hype that I otherwise only get from others Industries know.

But I found it interesting Lecture by Joachim Diercks, whom I unfortunately couldn't hear in full due to lack of time: He discussed with "Bots, algorithms and matching in personnel recruitment. Can machines also do soft skills?” red-hot topics - and thus offers my perfect transition to this year's trend topics at the fair: robots, artificial ones Intelligence and big data.

Artificial intelligence in the working world of tomorrow

The trade fair itself had given itself the motto "work:olution - moving minds" this year - after the world of work 4.0 in 2016, an increase was obviously necessary. It is about the upheavals that the automation of the working world will experience through robots and artificial intelligence - and the question of how we People shape these upheavals as actively as possible.

No wonder that the IBM Watson workshops are particularly popular here: IBM Personality Insights extracts and analyzes the needs and values ​​to provide recommendations on how to interact with a person individually. IBM Talent Insights, on the other hand, shows how insights and predictions can be determined from very large amounts of HR data - so-called big data in HR. The workshops show: With analytics and artificial intelligence, HR departments will not only be able to examine personnel data more closely in the future, but also have a greater influence on company decisions through more predictable personnel decisions. That's a scenario that I personally just can't handle positive aspects can wean off.

Better see opportunities as risks

Despite everything, the keynote speakers, some of whom were prominent, saw the opportunities rather than the opportunities risks in the digital Transformation. Futurist thinker and entrepreneur Nell Watson, for example, emphasized the advantages of such systems in her keynote speech: People can be monotonous Tasks give up, have more time for again creativity and is allowed to shape his life more self-determined and individual again - the machine serves the people, not the other way around.

This idea was underlined by Prof. Dr. Julian Nida-Rümelin. The philosopher and former Minister of State spoke in the keynote arena about his Idea of a “digital humanism” that clear puts the well-being of people at the center of digitization. At the same time, he called for clear ethical standards for dealing with new technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data Developer must always have in mind in order to be aware of the consequences of their actions.

Corporate Health, Integration of Refugees and Social Issues

The Initiative for New Quality of Work (INQA) of the Federal Ministry of Labor designed its own program on all three days of the fair with speakers such as the newly elected Member of the Bundestag Thomas Sattelberger, Dr. Jutta Rump (IBE Ludwigshafen), Dr. Natalie Lotzmann (SAP SE) and Rudolf Kast (ddn).

They talked and discussed, for example, about social aspects in the digital transformation of the world of work, the integration of refugees into the labor market or the question of why Health of Employees should definitely also be a matter for the boss. In general, corporate health is a topic that popped up again and again at many stands and in many lectures - perhaps also a trend that you can see in the Eye should keep.

Man must pretend the direction of the march

"Politics meets practice" was the motto of the Future Talk. Thorben Albrecht, State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, Dr. Bettina Volkens, Labor Director of Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Margret Suckale, former Human Resources Manager of the chemicals group BASF, and Markus Köhler, personnel manager at Microsoft, agreed that man must set the direction for the digitalization process.

The employers' representatives called on politicians to use new initiatives to give people a more positive picture of 4.0's work and the opportunities offered by digitization. State Secretary Albrecht emphasized that Companies would have a lot in and Further Training invest, in order to take the employees with you in the digital transformation. Both sides underlined that the people Anxiety must be taken before the changes.

Views 2018

After all, this is the perfect outlook for the next trade fair in 2018. Even if the final motto has not yet been decided, it shows where the journey is going. Moving minds - that doesn't just mean technical Innovation but also constant Things to Learn the employee. eLearning, microlearning or gamification in further education could then come to the fore even more than before.

And with that is fast clear that lifelong learning can be regarded as a future trend topic. And as Managing Director Ralf Hocke has already indicated, Zukunft Personal wants to be the catalyst for this in 2018.