Time for a paradigm shift while jobs as we know them fade away
• Prospects for future employment will rest heavily on the ability to adapt and reskill
Moving house always unearths a few treasures, and inevitably in our household, these treasures are long-forgotten books.
Most have been hoarded due to a vague sense of nostalgia or the avoidance of the guilt feelings that accompany throwing them away, but in this case, the old copy of Generation X that I found had already been replaced twice and I was overjoyed to have found the original.
The novel was the first of many written by Canadian author Douglas Coupland and lent its name to the generation of young people born between the late 1960s and early 1980s who were left in the wake of the Baby Boomers. The book was seminal to pop culture of the ’90s and noughties for the way it captured the alienation and emotional disenfranchisement of a generation that felt it had been given a raw deal.
Unlike their postwar predecessors, for whom a job was primarily seen as a means to an end and to a large extent defined social and economic standing, Generation X-ers were plagued with all sorts of existential crises and expected a job to provide them with both meaning and employment.
These days, Gen X-ers are all grown up and talk has shifted towards millennials and the potential they hold as a generation, but the focus on jobs is just as strong as it was in the early 90s, when Coupland’s book was first published.
As much as millennials are better educated than their predecessors and tend to favour lifestyle and experiences over money and prestige, the level of personal and civic debt carried by their generation means income — and by extension employment — remains a central concern.
You don’t need to look much further than the recent political narrative to see that this is true all over the world.
Jobs were a key element in the Brexit campaign, they are a flashpoint in southern Europe where almost half of all youths in Spain are without work. Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to bring back jobs to middle America, and in SA, we are all still waiting for the 5million jobs Jacob Zuma promised in 2011 to create.
The point I want to make is that now, and for the past several generations, jobs and employment have been central to the human zeitgeist. But this is all about to change.
The concept of a job as we know it is already changing, but it will be gone within a few decades. A study by Oxford University estimates that almost half of all jobs will disappear over the next 25 years. It also found that there was a strong negative relationship between wages and educational attainment and the occupation’s probability of computerisation.
If you are an accountant, doctor, lawyer, teacher, bureaucrat or financial analyst, it is likely you’ll be out of a job in the next 15 to 20 years. That might not sound so bad if you are 50, but by gum if you’re a freshly minted 25-year-old chartered accountant studying for your CFA, you might want to think twice.
What worries me about the current discourse is that the focus is always on jobs or job creation, but not on skills and learning. In a world in which we know that almost half of the people who have jobs will lose them (never mind those who are already unemployed) it is clear that we need a paradigm shift in the way we view education. If we are to deal with this coming Armageddon, we need to recognise that continued employment requires the ability to adapt and reskill.
In the new world, those who are highly employable will be those who are problem-solvers and lateral thinkers who can adapt their skills from an old job and apply them to the new one.
For this reason, schools must teach children how to spot opportunities and where they can add value. They must also teach children how to learn, not teach them content that they can quickly and easily find on the internet, and equip them with both resilience and adaptability.
Being successful in the new automated world will almost certainly require the ability to run your own business. A 2010 study by Intuit predicted that by 2020, 40% of American workers would be independent contractors. New research suggests that the population of ondemand workers will be more than twice as large by 2020.
The emergence of the “gig economy” is a result of a shift in the cultural and business environment that has seen the proliferation of independent workers who are contracted by organisations for temporary or short-term positions.
This has been assisted by the growth in a variety of apps and online platforms that make it easier for people to connect with customers who might like to hire them to do any number of jobs.
This has reduced the cost of starting and running a small business, since entrepreneurs no longer need office space or to spend thousands on advertising to get their businesses off the ground. Similarly, the growth in the gig economy means small businesses can reduce costs because they can hire assistance as they need it and don’t have the risks associated with hiring full-time workers.
This is good news for SA, where research by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor shows that small businesses are significant contributors to new jobs, creating more than 50% of all employment opportunities, mostly in the services sector. The small, medium and microsized enterprises sector contributes more than 45% of the country’s gross domestic product at present.
Unfortunately, according to the same data, SA’s rate of entrepreneurial activity is very low for a developing nation — a mere quarter of that seen in other subSaharan African countries.
With this in mind, it is important that we radically change the way we view education and the way we go about it.
To me, there has always been something vaguely Soviet and depressing about talking about industrialisation and beneficiation, as if the direction of the economy can really be planned. But in the coming, decades it will be even more irrelevant.
With the exception of the success achieved by the developmental states of eastern Asia in the second half of the past century, governments are notoriously bad in picking winners, and if digital disruption has taught us anything, it is that anything is possible.
IN THE NEW WORLD, THOSE WHO ARE HIGHLY EMPLOYABLE WILL BE LATERAL THINKERS WHO CAN ADAPT THEIR SKILLS