We learned Monday that we are now in the early months of a recession that started in February. As the economy seeks a balance between reopening and public health safety, employers are making plans for what their workforces will look like in the coming months. There are many unknowns ahead, but we’re already hearing that it won’t be “business as usual.”

Joe Fuller is the co-director for Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work project, which analyzes research and recommends plans of action for business and policy leaders trying to navigate the evolution of the workforce.

Fuller has spent the last few weeks speaking to employers about what they’ve been thinking about when it comes to bringing employees back to work and hiring new workers. He is the guest on this episode of Work in Progress.

“What I think we are going to see with employers is that they’re going to proceed cautiously on the whole with rehiring. You can already see more progressive employers investing in—or beginning to plan for—how they’re going to upskill their current employees for this new reality,” he says.

“How are they going to get them to be able to be productive with some of these new (tech) tools, with specific emphasis on making them more—the word that employers often use—agile. The word that I’m going to use is more fungible, and this goes down also to jobs that we don’t historically think of as being high-paying or even technologically oriented.”

So what does this mean for job seekers? What skills do they need moving forward and how do they get them? Fuller and I spend much of the episode on these questions.

You can listen to Work in Progress here, or find us wherever you find your podcasts.

Episode 137: Joe Fuller, Harvard Business School professor and Managing the Future of Work co-director

Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation

Producer: Larry Buhl

Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim

Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts