Innovation expert talks about the importance of reinventing oneself

It is necessary to reinvent itself. Not only in this pandemic moment, but whenever things change – in the world, in the country, in companies, in your area of ​​operation. This is the main conclusion of the VAGAS.com live with professor Fernando Arbache, professor at FGV, consultant at MIT in Brazil and founder of Arbache Innovations. Check out the full conversation in this video and the main highlights in the text below the video.

Humanity has always needed to reinvent itself

Professor Arbache believes that the need to reinvent himself has existed for a long time and is already part of human history. For him, whenever new technologies appear, some jobs cease to exist and other jobs appear. “I usually say that since the first Industrial Revolution, when the craftsman started losing his job, the evolution of automation technology has been creating new areas and eliminating others”, he says.

An example of an area that has disappeared is typing. Nowadays, as the professor says, nobody else takes a typing course. “Teachers are no longer employed, schools are gone,” he says. And that happened with other areas – photocopying, photo development are other examples.

“We have had to reinvent ourselves for a long time, this is common in the history of mankind”, he says. What has changed is that today we need to reinvent ourselves much faster because technologies change all the time.

From CEO to intern: everyone needs to reinvent themselves

The professor also says that from the intern to the company president, everyone needs to reinvent themselves. That’s because the CEO that companies want today is not the same as what they wanted before. The same goes for interns, analysts, coordinators. And even this division of jobs is reinventing itself. It is possible that in the future they will no longer exist in most companies. At VAGAS, for example, the structure is horizontal – this means that nobody is boss of anyone, everyone works together.

Many professionals also see their work change. Bankers, for example, are seeing fewer and fewer branches. Taxi drivers saw the rise of Uber. “All of these segments experienced their small pandemics”, compares Arbache. “The digital transformation has come and there is no going back.”

When is the time to seek new skills?

According to the professor, there is no right time, and that is the big problem. No company foresaw the Covid pandemic when it did its strategic planning for 2020. Many things happen without our foresight. So we need to understand what our skills are and what skills will be needed in the future. With that, we can try to develop whatever it takes to be ready for what’s to come. “Those who do not look ahead are caught by surprise and need to reinvent themselves very quickly”, he warns.

What skills are most needed today

According to Arbache, we need empathy to understand what others are feeling. This is the role of people who cannot be replaced by robots. “The robot will replace careers that are repetitive, I have no doubt,” he says. “But the robot still doesn’t know how to create, compose music, have crazy ideas”, he says.

Therefore, we need to understand that we need to use more creativity and work more with people, with teams. “The world has changed and there is room for everyone who decides to change, as it always has,” he says. The great difficulty, in most cases, is to accept that we need to change. The reality is there and it doesn’t change – we need to adapt.

Another important competence is the ability to adapt. People need to adapt to new contexts. The teacher told the story of two Somali professionals he met. They didn’t have elementary school, they lived in a tribe, their parents were pirates and one of the thefts they did was computers, which allowed them to use the Facebook internet for Africa, which is free, and create a company that today is worth 800 million dollars. A year later, their company was already a unicorn and was worth 1 billion dollars.

“These people had no recourse, they were psychologically very shaken and lived in a very poor place, in a cruel reality,” he says. And none of that stopped them from developing. “We have problems, but we have conditions and possibilities and we need the will to overcome barriers that will always exist”, he says. Covid is one of them, it came, it brought a series of restrictions and a lot of people reinvented themselves.

Adaptability, as he says, is very important today. And the ability to adapt quickly to new situations as well. This agility is what many companies call “agile”. “Companies are looking for people who are agile, who can solve complex problems, who are adaptive and engaged,” he says.

Is it more important to reinvent behaviorally or technically?

For the teacher, the behavioral today is more important because knowledge is easier to acquire. “It is much more difficult to change a person’s behavior than to acquire knowledge,” he says. And today it is very important that the professional has a cultural fit with the company, which means that the person needs to be adapted to the company’s way of working. And this “fit” is also being taken into account during the selection process. Companies are less concerned with the curriculum and more interested in meeting the people who will be hired. selection by values.

This does not mean that people do not need to seek technical knowledge. On the contrary, all technical knowledge courses are of great value. But the question, as the professor says, is not just taking the course. “It is to understand what course you need at each moment of your career”, he says. You need to keep an eye on the course and know that you need it. For that, you need to know yourself – to know who you are, what you like to know. Then, yes, you get to know what course you need to take in order to graduate technically. The technique comes in second place. “Previously, the technique was fundamental”, says the professor. “Today, the techniques are used by robots and we need to look to the future to adapt continuously.”