How to Prepare for an Automated Future
We don’t know how quickly machines will displace people’s
jobs, or how many they’ll take, but we know it’s happening — not just to factory
workers but also to money
managers, dermatologists
and retail
workers.
The logical
response seems to be to educate people differently, so they’re prepared to work
alongside the robots or do the jobs that machines can’t. But how to do that,
and whether training can outpace automation, are open questions.
Pew
Research Center and Elon University surveyed
1,408 people who work in technology and education to find out if they think
new schooling will emerge in the next decade to successfully train workers for
the future. Two-thirds said yes; the rest said no. Following are questions
about what’s next for workers, and answers based on the survey responses.
How
do we educate people for an automated world?
People
still need to learn skills, the respondents said, but they will do that
continuously over their careers. In school, the most important thing they can
learn is how to learn.
At
universities, “people learn how to approach new things, ask questions and find
answers, deal with new situations,” wrote Uta Russmann, a professor of
communications at the FHWien University of Applied Sciences in Vienna. “All
this is needed to adjust to ongoing changes in work life. Special skills for a
particular job will be learned on the job.”
Schools
will also need to teach traits that machines can’t yet easily replicate, like
creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, adaptability and
collaboration. The problem, many respondents said, is that these are not
necessarily easy to teach.
“Many of
the ‘skills’ that will be needed are more like personality characteristics,
like curiosity, or social skills that require enculturation to take hold,”
wrote Stowe Boyd, managing director of Another Voice, which provides research
on the new economy.
Can
we change education fast enough to outpace the machines?
About
two-thirds of the respondents thought it could be done in the next decade; the
rest thought that education reform takes too much time, money and political
will, and that automation is moving too quickly.
“I
have complete faith in the ability to identify job gaps and develop educational
tools to address those gaps,” wrote Danah Boyd, a principal researcher at
Microsoft Research and founder of Data and Society, a research institute. “I
have zero confidence in us having the political will to address the
socioeconomic factors that are underpinning skill training.”
Andrew
Walls, managing vice president at Gartner, wrote, “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.”
Will college degrees still be important?
College is
more valuable than ever, research
shows. The jobs that are still relatively safe from automation require
higher education, as well as interpersonal
skills fostered by living with other students.
“Human bodies
in close proximity to other human bodies stimulate real compassion, empathy,
vulnerability and social-emotional intelligence,” said Frank Elavsky, data and
policy analyst at Acumen, a policy research firm.
But many survey respondents said a degree was not enough
— or not always the best choice, especially given its price tag. Many of them
expect more emphasis on certificates or badges, earned from online courses or
workshops, even for college graduates.
One
potential future, said David Karger, a professor of computer science at M.I.T.,
would be for faculty at top universities to teach online and for mid-tier
universities to “consist entirely of a cadre of teaching assistants who provide
support for the students.”
Employers
will also place more value on on-the-job learning, many respondents said, such
as apprenticeships or on-demand trainings at workplaces. Portfolios of work are
becoming more important than résumés.
“Résumés
simply are too two-dimensional to properly communicate someone’s skill set,” wrote
Meryl Krieger, a career specialist at Indiana University. “Three-dimensional
materials — in essence, job reels that demonstrate expertise — will be the
ultimate demonstration of an individual worker’s skills.”
What
can workers do now to prepare?
Consider
it part of your job description to keep learning, many respondents said — learn
new skills on the job, take classes, teach yourself new things.
Focus
on learning how to do tasks that still need humans, said Judith Donath of
Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society: teaching and
caregiving; building and repairing; and researching and evaluating.
The
problem is that not everyone is cut out for independent learning, which takes a
lot of drive and discipline. People who are suited for it tend to come from
privileged backgrounds, with a good education and supportive parents, said Beth
Corzo-Duchardt, a media historian at Muhlenberg College. “The fact that a high
degree of self-direction may be required in the new work force means that
existing structures of inequality will be replicated in the future,” she said.
Even if we do all these things, will there be enough
jobs?
Jonathan
Grudin, a principal researcher at Microsoft, said he was optimistic about the
future of work as long as people learned technological skills: “People will
create the jobs of the future, not simply train for them, and technology is
already central.”
But the
third of respondents who were pessimistic about the future of education reform
said it won’t matter if there are no jobs to train for.
“The
‘jobs of the future’ are likely to be performed by robots,” said Nathaniel
Borenstein, chief scientist at Mimecast, an email company. “The question isn’t
how to train people for nonexistent jobs. It’s how to share the wealth in a
world where we don’t need most people to work.”
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming Event | MANLIBNET 17th
Annual International Conference on 15-16 September 2017 at Jaipuria, Noida,
India
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