Threat to middle-skilled roles demands a radical rethink of training and skills
‘Highest stock market EVER! Jobs are roaring back!’ boasted US President Donald Trump in a tweet in December. Trump is the most prominent advocate of the idea that quantity is almost all that counts when it comes to jobs.
But job numbers alone are an increasingly crude barometer of economic health. For workers under pressure from changing tech- nology and globalisation, a new measure is required, based on job quality as much as job quantity.
More subtle politicians have been quick to realise this. Philip Hammond, UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, referred in his Budget speech in November to a ‘relentless focus on getting more people into work’. But he added the condition that such work should be ‘good quality and well paid’.
A few days later, the UK government laid out four ‘grand challenges’ of its industrial strategy, including the promotion of Artificial Intelligence (AI). ‘Embedding AI across the UK will create thousands of good quality jobs and drive economic growth’, the strategy doc- ument insisted.
Recent history suggests the UK may be in- dulging in some wishful thinking. Automation is one of the forces identified by David Autor of MIT as squeezing out ‘good jobs’ - the mid- dle-skilled roles to which ‘ordinary working people’ (to use the politicians’ mantra) would aspire. Globalisation is another such pressure. The remainder of the workforce is polarising into high-level managerial and professional posts and low-tier service jobs. Such good jobs as survive demand ever more sophisti- cated skills.
For managers who hold on to their posi- tions, this poses important new tests. Rick Wartzman, whose book is subtitled ‘The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America’, says the challenge starts with whether to cut jobs, or find ways to reposition staff for the automation revolution.
“Management is about making these kinds of decisions,” he said. For instance, “[how] to put people, or combinations of people and technology, in the right position to maximise effectiveness. Doing an across-the-board cost- cutting exercise isn’t management.”
The Brookings Institution recently looked at 14mn ‘good jobs’ in the US and found that their ‘digital score’ - based on the knowledge, skills and tools needed to fulfil those roles - had risen from 29 to 50 between 2002 and 2016, out of a possible score of 100 for the most ‘digitally intense’ occupations. In other words, basic digital skills are now a prerequi- site for positions - mechanic, nurse, builder - which traditionally open the door to advance- ment for the two-thirds of Americans who lack a college degree.
The same challenge is multiplied by many millions in populous, fast-growing countries such as India. One Indian manufacturing ty- coon I met just shrugged when I asked whether he felt any responsibility to the staff he would have to lay off as he installed more sophisticated machines in his factories. His response was just one indication that digital- isation could slam the door in the face of many young Indians, who are counting on basic literacy and numeracy to open up de- cent production line jobs.
Sometimes, a lack of such skills also blights the future of people forced out of good jobs. In Amy Goldstein’s book workers laid off by General Motors flocked to the Wis- consin town’s college to retrain, only for their teachers to discover that some ‘didn’t even know how to turn [a computer] on’.
One responsibility of future managers is to ensure that this ground-level digital educa- tion is made available. ‘The next phase of the digital skills push needs to add a new, less- glamorous focus on IT basics such as Mi- crosoft Office and basic customer relationship management (CRM) software to the cooler agenda of scaling up the code schools’, Brook- ings fellow Mark Muro wrote in a blogpost about the thinktank’s report.
The model, says Wartzman, needs to change to one in which managers offer staff opportunities for lifelong learning. Ideally, this should happen on the job, rather than after redundancy, when the efficacy of retraining may be undermined by the general lack of op- portunities, as happened to Janesville’s unem- ployed car workers in the depths of the 2008-09 recession.
The last resort may be to find ways to change the status of what used to be consid- ered poor jobs. In Taiwan, the government successfully improved urban cleanliness by upgrading the ‘bad job’ of street cleaning. It now comes with a salary close to the national average and a decent pension. Public compe- titions pit ‘clean teams’ from different dis- tricts against each other.
It is an idiosyncratic example, but it under- lines a point that Trump may want to con- sider. Creating more jobs is a fine goal; creating better jobs is even finer.