Global disruption, technological advances, and population demographics are rapidly affecting the types of jobs that are available and the workers who will fill those jobs in the future of work. Successful workers in the dynamic and uncertain landscape of the workplace of the future will need to adapt rapidly to changing job demands, highlighting the necessity for lifelong learning and development. With few exceptions, industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists have tended to take an organization-centered perspective on training and development; a perspective that promotes worker development as a means to organizational success. Hence, we call for a broadening of this view to include a person-centered perspective on workplace learning focused on individual skill development. A person-centered perspective addresses lifelong learning and skill development for those already in the labor force, whether they are working within or outside of organizations (e.g., gig workers), or those looking for work. It includes the most vulnerable people currently working or seeking work. We describe the factors affecting the future of work, the need to incorporate a person-centered perspective on work-related skill learning into I-O research and practice, and highlight several areas for future research and practice.

Over 61% of the world’s population lives and works in the informal economic sector. However, workers in the informal economy are conspicuous by their relative absence in work psychology research and practice. Policy agendas inspired by economic research often combine skilled and unskilled workers into a single category, lacking the voice of the poor worker and a psychological understanding of work in the informal sector. Using grassroots-level field data from highly skilled artisans in rural India, this study unearths the person-centric inner experiences of informal work, and examines the psychological foundations of Decent Work in a heretofore unexamined population of workers in the informal economy. Using inductive and abductive approaches, results reveal the affective, attentional, task and culturally-embedded contextual characteristics of work in the informal economy, along with the psychological nuance behind key tenets of economic ideas around decency and choice in Decent Work. These experiences reveal core facets of well-being in the world of work in the informal economy, and an operational definition of psychologically sustainable work that is aligned with local values, aspirations and capabilities. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for incorporating psychology and the study’s evidence-based findings into the International Labour Organization's Decent Work agenda.

Drawing on self-regulatory strength models of self-control, this research examined the relationship between burnout and attentional processes for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students. Using data from participants in STEM, burnout was found to be associated with higher levels of off-task thinking, also known as mind-wandering. Further, self-control acted as a mediator in the relationship between burnout and mind-wandering such that higher levels of burnout predicted poor self-control that subsequently increased the mind’s tendency to wander. Additionally, mindfulness buffered the relationship between burnout and mind-wandering such that burnout had the most detrimental impact on attention for those students who were low in mindfulness. Using the Johnson-Neyman approach, results reveal the upper limits for the moderating impact of mindfulness. Results and implications for science and practice are discussed with a special grounding for students in the STEM context.

The concept of a sustainable livelihood affords protection from crises and protects people, including future generations. Conceptually, this paper serves as a study protocol that extends the premises of decent work to include and integrate criteria that benefit people, planet, and prosperity. Existing measures of sustainability principally serve organisations and governments, not individual workers who are increasingly looking for ‘just transitions’ into sustainable livelihoods. Incorporating extant measurement standards from systems theory, vocational psychology, psychometrics, labour and management studies, we conceptualise a classification of livelihoods, criteria for their sustainability, forming a study protocol for indexing these livelihoods, a set of theory-based propositions, and a pilot test of this context-sensitive model.