Potential of the Essay Method and Text Mining Analysis for Foresight of Workplace Evolution: A Case of Generation Z Representatives

The rapid pace of technological advancement and evolving societal values have been transforming workplaces for some time, creating considerable uncertainty about the future of work. Efforts have been made to anticipate some of the trends and changes to help workplaces adapt to a new working reality, for example, by implementing digital technologies and introducing policies focused on productivity and/or employee well-being. The evolution of the workplace has been further accelerated by the changing demographic profile of its workforce and, thus, a changing view of work-related attitudes, expectations and needs. With an aging workforce and the arrival of Generation Z (Gen Z) into the labour market, it is increasingly important to know and understand how the philosophy of work differs amongst generations and, in particular, what Gen Z expects from their future employers and working lives.

Traditional predictive methods, such as forecasting, rely on models based on historical quantitative data, which cannot fully capture the emerging and unknown, nor the qualitative shifts and the complex interdependencies of attitudinal factors influencing workplace evolution. These include a new set of individual and generational values and behaviours of the future workforce. To address the current lack of knowledge, this chapter aims firstly to review the literature on the subject of evolving workplaces and secondly to explore an essay method as a tool for collecting informative data from students currently enrolled in full-time Higher Education degree pro-grammes, but about to enter the labour market and search for employment. It is proposed that this new method can be used as a systematic tool for anticipating long-term changes in the work-place because it allows students to express freely and creatively how they imagine their future work and workplace engagement.

In this chapter, we suggest that imagining future workplaces is a good proxy for capturing students’ expectations, as it can help them to articulate an image of their professional self and in-form their career choices. At the same time, essays can generate rich themes of narrative qualitative data that can be analysed in-depth thought.