Digital technology touching more jobs

Increases productivity, cuts down labor force

For a city famed for its public embrace of the tech industry — we are now “Roboburgh” in the eyes of many — Pittsburgh may be forgetting that the bulk of its workforce is experiencing a dramatic rise in digital technology.

While the likes of Carnegie Mellon University, Uber, Google and Duolingo are pushing for a workforce of roboticists and highlevel engineers, it’s the more incremental — and sometimes unexciting — advances in industries like mining, nursing, construction and manufacturing that will have a broader impact on the region’s economy.

A new report released on Wednesday by the Brookings Institution shows digital technology has

become pervasive across 545 occupations that cover 90 percent of the American workforce since 2001.

Three Brookings researchers, in what they describe as a first-of-its-kind study, dug deep into occupational data that showed the degree to which workers across the country interact with computers in their jobs.

Researchers grouped U.S. occupations into three categories — jobs that require high, medium or low digital skills — and tracked the impacts of rapid change.

The study illuminates just how far-reaching the skills gap is between workers and employers in today’s economy.

“We’ve paid a lot of attention — and rightly so — to the tech sector, and tech accelerators and coding, and the software-focused, entrepreneurial skills agenda,” said Mark Muro, an author of the study and the senior fellow and policy director for Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program.

But, “We haven’t been thinking about the massive disruptions occurring at the low and medium end, with great possibility of helping people become more connected to the labor market,” Mr. Muro said.

On one hand, workers who use digital technology steadily make more money — average annual wages increase from $30,000 a year for low- digital jobs to $48,000 a year to mediumdigital jobs to $73,000 for high-digital jobs, the study found. Digitally skilled workers have a skill set that can transfer to other jobs, Mr. Muro said.

However, computers make workers more productive, which labor economists believe has led to widespread job losses, especially in manufacturing and goods-producing industries.

For example, the report found digital technology in mining more than doubled over the last 15 years. Along with a more recent drop in demand for coal, technology like the longwall machine has led to a precipitous drop in coal jobs.

Miner productivity has more than quadrupled since 1980, while employment has shriveled from 35,000 in 1980 to 3,300 in 2016, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

The same trend is seen in industries with greater employment and economic consequence, the report showed. Construction nearly tripled its use of digital technology; oil and gas saw a 72 percent increase; and registered nurses saw a 44 percent increase since2001.

High-tech job growth grew in Pittsburgh by 31 percent in 2015 and 2016, the third highest high-tech job growth in in the country behind San Francisco and Charlotte, N.C., according to a report, also released Wednesday, from CBRE, the commercial real estate firm.

“There really are fewer and fewer low-digital positions, and we think that poses a social inclusion problem,” Mr. Muro said.

More people need to be comfortable using software programs and tools like Microsoft Office, Salesforce, PeopleSoft, Slack and Skype. “The higher-end IT agenda needs to became more of a entry-level IT agenda.”

As a region, employers and workforce officials continue to grapple with how to handle emerging skills.

Last year, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development released a wellpublicized report that predicted a shortfall of 80,000 workers in the Pittsburgh region by 2025. According to its study, employers need to retooltheir expectations for new hires amid a wave of baby boomer retirements and as technology disrupts the skills neededfor certain jobs.

The conference is planning a 2017-18 update to the report in the coming months.

Partner4Work, Allegheny County’s workforce development board, launched in 2015 the TechHire initiative, which aims to get people into entry-level web developer and quality assurance positions with a series of coding “boot camps.”