What is the Future of Jobs?
Early
life on the planet was self-sustainable, that is how nature and humans
coexisted. If someone needed shelter, they built a home with resources
indigenously available to them. If someone was hungry, they hunted for food in
their vicinity. Over a period of time and after several economic revolutions,
human needs have expanded. Today, jobs are meant to fulfil not just needs but
also the desires of mankind. This is an unsustainable model in the long run.
Having
said that, this model of chasing desires through a job is not being followed by
everyone. Many are struggling to fulfil even basic needs. According to the UN
Food and Agriculture Organization, one in every nine persons is suffering from
chronic undernourishment. As many as 795 million people are hungry and 836
million are living in extreme poverty. So is the GDP measuring scale of
development the right way to calculate a country’s growth?
Since
the time of the industrial revolution, the focus has been on creating jobs
rather than creating a wholesome society. Even our education system is focused
on creating more and more jobs. Our orientation for the last 100 years has been
driven by the philosophy of industrial revolution and an industrial society.
But is that the future of jobs as well? When we talk about a knowledgebased
society or an information-based society, will we continue to think of jobs that
exist today and skills that are required today. Will we continue to follow
GDP-based economic development?
Let’s
imagine we’re in the future of a connected society. Twenty years from now, we
will be even more connected than we are today. With everyone connected in a
knowledge economy, information (or data) will be the single largest commodity
for humans and machines to deal with. For such a future, are we creating enough
human skills that are trained in dealing with information as a commodity, a
product or a service considering that information, because of its many avatars,
cannot be dealt with using a software or application alone? Are our schools, training
institutes, universities and vocational organizations training people in such
skills?
Let’s
go back 20 years now. Most of the jobs that have been created in the last 20
years due to the 1990s IT boom required skills that weren’t immediately
available. However, people were hired and trained on the job while education
institutes slowly began to update their curriculum or introduce a new
curriculum altogether (though the industry still complains that academia is not
training people for the current needs). But most IT skills teach human
resources to run machines, write code and develop software rather than train
them in dealing with information as a commodity to understand its impact on
humans or to serve fellow citizens. Take, for example, Common Services Centres
(CSCs). In 2007, the Indian government decided to create entrepreneurship-based
rural information resource centres. Today, the number of these CSCs stands at
250,000. Most of the individuals hired for this job had basic computer
skills—how to turn it on or off and run a few basic applications. If I go back
to analyse the successes and failures of the person who ran the CSCs—the
villagelevel entrepreneurs—I’ll find that none of them were trained in
entrepreneurship, information and communications technology (ICT) skills or
even human behaviour. Hundreds and thousands of CSCs eventually shut down or
became ineffective. Firms responsible for setting up and running the CSCs, too,
withdrew their support. Even today, there is no institute in the country that
trains people to facilitate transfer of information at the grassroots level
even as millions of those living below the poverty line in rural parts are
exploited by middlemen due to lack of information, especially about government
schemes and entitlements.
As
I’ve shared many times, we have established 200 Community Information Resource
Centres (CIRCs) across 80 districts in the last 10 years. Every individual that
we have hired in this last decade to work at these CIRCs has been an untrained
person. Some of them knew how to operate computers but none of them knew how to
manage information or disseminate information; and so they were trained on the
job to curate and facilitate transfer of information to community members about
panchayat notifications, government schemes, entitlements, market linkages and
prices of crops or other products, among hundreds of other things.
In
the next 20 years, we want to set up 3,000 CIRCs in India’s 272 backward
districts. We will need at least 9,000 impeccable people to run and manage
these centres; people who know how to deal with people and information, to
become points of delivery for underserved communities. I have no clue where
I’ll get these people or whether I will have to train them on the job.
The
reason why the Right to Information Act (RTI) came into existence was to enable
the government to proactively facilitate information transfer to citizens. RTI
was framed because demand for information existed; and this information was
available with the government but was inaccessible to most because the
government wasn’t equipped or trained to provide relevant information to the
public on a periodic basis. Even today, almost every government website has an
RTI section, yet information on the page is not properly curated. In fact, no
agency, other than the Kerala government, is proactively working on making
information available to its citizens.
In
a scenario where the entire country is connected to the Internet, there will be
an even greater demand to access information available online and for human
resources skilled in digging out relevant information in a timely manner to
serve the community. The future of jobs would lie in treating information as a
commodity, learning to retrieve required information from the Web or other
online platforms like apps, curating the available information for best
utilization by local communities, and disseminating the information in a
time-bound manner. Skills in information and knowledge processing is the need
of a future that is not very far away; and adequate training in understanding
this information, in various areas of specialisation, can equip India’s young
for jobs of the future. The jobs of the future may also lie in creating
ecosystems to study information, artificial intelligence, data science, big
data, analytics and algorithms to offer a new paradigm of education, literacy
and knowledge.
Osama
Manzar is founder-director of Digital Empowerment Foundation and chair of
Manthan and mBillionth awards. He is member, advisory board, at Alliance for
Affordable Internet and has co-authored NetCh@kra–15 Years of Internet in India
and Internet Economy of India. He tweets @osamamanzar.
Source | Mint – The Wall street
Journal | 26 July 2017
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming Lecture | ACTREC - BOSLA Annual lecture series (125th birth anniversary of father of library
science, Padmashree Dr. S. R. Ranganathan) on Saturday, 12th August 2017 at Advanced Centre for Treatment,
Research and Education in Cancer (ACTREC), Kharghar, Navi Mumbai. (Theme | 'MakerSpace')
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