Bosses believe your work skills will soon be useless
Bosses believe your work skills will soon be useless
By Danielle Paquette May 3, 2017
Nearly a third of business leaders and technology
analysts express “no confidence” that education and job training in the United
States will evolve rapidly enough to match the next decade’s labor market
demands, a new report from the Pew Research Center finds.
About 30 percent of the executives, hiring managers,
college professors and automation researchers who responded to the Pew survey
felt future prospects looked bleak, anticipating that firms would encounter
more trouble finding workers with their desired skill sets over the next
decade.
“Barring a neuroscience advance that enables us to embed
knowledge and skills directly into brain tissue and muscle formation, there
will be no quantum leap in our ability to ‘up-skill’ people,” wrote Andrew
Walls, managing vice president at Gartner, an IT consulting firm.
“Seriously? You’re asking about the workforce of the
future?” added another respondent, a science editor who asked to stay
anonymous. “As if there’s going to be one?”
Lee Rainie, Pew’s director of Internet, science and
technology research, the study’s co-author, helped canvass, reaching out to
8,000 decision makers in Pew's database. About 1,400 responded, and many of
those told the researchers they were bracing for machines to transform the ways
humans work -- sometimes in unpredictable ways.
“People are wrestling with this basic metaphysical
question: What are humans good for?” he said. “It’s important to figure that
out because this blended world of machines and humans is already upon us and
it’s going to accelerate.”
Most of the business and technology professionals
expected new training programs to emerge, both at schools and on the private
market, to better prepare the future labor force. But 30 percent of the 1,408
respondents doubted such a quick transformation could take place. They felt,
according to the report, that “adaptation in teaching environments will not be
sufficient to prepare workers for future jobs.”
Jerry Michalski, the founder at REX, a technology think
tank in Portland, Ore., feared public schools and universities aren’t keeping
up with changes in the economy.
“They take too long to teach impractical skills,” he
wrote, “and knowledge not connected to the real world.”
“I’m skeptical that educational and training programs can
keep pace with technology,” added Thomas Claburn, editor-at-large at
Information Week, a news site.
Jason Hong, a Carnegie Mellon University professor,
argued the country can train “small numbers of individuals” for more
computerized roles at community colleges and in the university system. And
while coding classes, for example, are cropping up on campuses, learning how to
work in the computer realm just isn’t part of the broader American curriculum.
“There are two major components needed for a new kind of
training program at this scale: political will and a proven technology
platform,” Hong wrote. “Even assuming that the political will (and budget)
existed, there’s no platform today that can successfully train large numbers of
people.”
The next generation of workers should learn how to code,
the Pew report asserts, or brush up on data science — both skills that would
serve them well in increasingly automated workplaces. But they shouldn’t
underestimate the importance of so-called emotional intelligence, or the
ability to gracefully manage employees, co-workers and clients.
“The skills necessary at the higher echelons will include
especially the ability to efficiently network, manage public relations, display
intercultural sensitivity… and just enough creativity to think outside the
box,” wrote Simon Gottschalk, a sociology professor at the University of
Nevada, Las Vegas.
Frank Elavsky, a data and policy analyst at Acumen LLC,
an analytic tool developer, said people can hone those skills in this digital
age by remembering to interact with other people.
“The most important skills to have in life are gained
through interpersonal experiences,” he wrote. “Human bodies in close proximity
to other human bodies stimulate real compassion, empathy, vulnerability and
social-emotional intelligence.”
B. Remy Cross, an assistant professor of sociology at
Webster University in Missouri, expressed doubt that future workers could
easily bolster their social skills in an increasingly online world.
“It is too hard to adequately instruct large numbers of
people in the kinds of soft skills that are anticipated as being in most
demand,” Cross wrote. “As manufacturing jobs move overseas or are fully
mechanized, we will see a bulge in service jobs. These require good people
skills, something that is often hard to train online.”
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