‘New-collar’ jobs can plug gaps if we stop fixating on degrees
• New ways of working allow more people to learn on the job and focus on in-demand skills
On Tuesday Stats SA shared the latest results from its quarterly employment statistics (QES) survey, showing that formal employment in the country took a 1.8% hit in late 2023, shedding 194,000 jobs from September to December.
Total employment in the formal sector dropped from 10.9-million in September to 10.7-million, underpinned by a hefty 13.5% decrease in parttime employment. Full-time employment decreased by just 5,000. Also in the “silver linings” column is that year on year, employment in both full-time and part-time groupings is actually up, by 0.1% and 7.6%, respectively.
Let’s be honest, though, there aren’t many glittery nuggets of relief in the trash pile of our employment numbers. According to the World Bank, we have the highest unemployment rate in the world — despite being Africa’s most industrialised economy. When we account for the disillusioned, the number of unemployed South Africans is more than 40%, and in the 15- to 24-year-old grouping, the expanded number is an astounding 70%.
Tech’s relationship with employment has been a strained and contradictory affair since industrialisation. Advances in tech, and innovations out of said advances, can create whole new sectors, products or services. Tech can connect people to employers, and enable remote work and global collaboration.
But it has also been a site of job haemorrhage in recent years, as start-ups fail and big tech rebalances after pandemic hiring growth. Moreover, we’ve seen how mechanisation and machine learning takes away “blue-collar” job opportunities as drones, robots and sensorequipped tools find homes on the factory floors, on our transport and distribution routes, and in retail spaces.
And, of course, everyone’s favourite talking point now is how “white-collar” workers’ job security is under threat as generative artificial intelligence (genAI) starts to nibble away at jobs in copywriting, design, and legal and accounting functions.
So where does that leave us as a nation, needing so desperately to grow employment and develop our economy? Well, “new-collar” jobs could plug an obvious gap if we can let go of a much-loved bias: the need for a degree.
New-collar work lives in that space between white and blue. It is highly associated with technological and technical jobs, which naturally require skills but with an emphasis on quick and applicable versions thereof. A content worker with a focus on social platforms arguably needs a crash course in cameras and editing, but less so “media economics 2”.
Before the academics come for me, brandishing flaming history and pointy insight, I concur that degrees are great, useful and even important. I am a fan, with two and a bit under my belt and a semi-annual hankering to chase a PhD.
I am a better journalist for a hard-won understanding of semiotics, media ownership and law, but making space for newcollar work allows for a revamped workplace where learning isn’t delivered in chunks of years but in bytes of know-how.
It also acknowledges that degrees no longer offer the guarantee of employment. For employers, a degree shows a candidate can jump through institutional hoops — and all that implies — but it no longer means the most up-to-date skills.
“New collar” as a category is certainly having a moment in the sun. A 2023 article from the Harvard Business Review reads: “Millions of people are locked out of promising job opportunities because too many companies default to hiring workers with four-year degrees, even for positions that don’t require that level of education.”
That this comes from a publication associated with an Ivy League college is not lost on me, and it won’t be missed by the Review’s readers either, who tend to stem from both academia and business management spaces.
The article points out that hiring managers think a bachelor’s degree is “a good proxy for collaboration skills, a sense of initiative and the ability to think critically, but there’s virtually no evidence to support that notion”. The article also cites research from Harvard Business School and Accenture that found there were “no boosts in productivity” for “middle-skill” jobs when those were done by college graduates.
That is, I hasten to caution, research undertaken in a highly developed economy with largely standardised schooling. Would they find the same in a country like SA, with wildly varying experiences of school education?
Here, we have to grapple not just with the gulf between private and public institutions but also between rural and urban schools — with the resources and teachers they can access — and account for the huge number of pupils who learn in their second or third language, with empty bellies, in crumbling classrooms with barely a textbook between them.
Not only does embracing new-collar work — in addition to blue and white — in our workplaces give companies access to the latest skills, it would allow more people to learn on the job, skip the student debt burden and focus on indemand skills. It also promotes new learning from companies that offer short online courses and things like coding boot camps.
This is just the first radical shift local industry must prepare for. Analysis from labour market analytics firm Lightcast shows that job postings requiring genAI skills from candidates grew 1,848% in 2023, though they remain only a small segment of the overall job market.
Lightcast draws its analysis from almost 2-million online job postings published since 2019. Last year 10,000 or so listings were looking specifically for genAI skills, while 385,000 sought candidates for jobs in the broader AI sphere.
The roles that would need such skills? Some predictable ones, like data scientists and software engineers, but some surprised the analysts, like curriculum writers.
A senior economist quoted in the report said this could be “the first sign of the second wave of AI, where this technology starts to reshape jobs outside of the tech industry”.
The third wave will arrive long before the textbooks are written. We need the workers who will ride it, as much as the philosophers and historians who unpack it for us.