Wal-Mart and the Workforce of the Future

In HBS Working Knowledge, interesting view of changes in the workplace once it is digitized and moves towards automation.     With Wal-Mart as example.

Walmart's Workforce of the Future     by Julia Hanna
A case study by William Kerr explores Walmart's plans for future workforce makeup and training, and its search for opportunities from digital infrastructure and automation.

Any discussion of the future of retail—or how we work—has to include Walmart. As of 2017, 90 percent of the US population lived within 10 miles of a Walmart store; with 11,766 locations worldwide and $514 billion in annual revenues, the discount store also has the distinction of being the largest private employer in the United States, with 1.5 million workers (2.2 million worldwide).

But that size and dominance doesn’t make Walmart immune to pressures faced by any other retail operation. In the second-year Harvard Business School course Managing the Future of Work, Professor William Kerr explores how technology and demographics are changing the way companies like Walmart, and their workers, operate.

“The pace of change in the retail sector is truly extraordinary,” says Kerr, the D’Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration and co-director of Harvard’s Managing the Future of Work initiative. “That requires a lot of reskilling of employees and hard choices, in an uncertain environment, in terms of how to deploy capital.”

“THIS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CREATES NEW JOBS, BUT, MORE IMPORTANT, IT CHANGES THE NATURE OF JOBS, EVEN ENTRY-LEVEL ONES. ...... "