The 2016 election brought to light that a growing segment of the population feels disenfranchised, and unable to compete despite the current low unemployment rate of 4.9% according to the US Department of Labor. This trend is playing out not just in the U.S., but across the world as well. I spent last weekend at the Aspen Ministers Forum discussing these trends and what they mean for policy makers and business leaders. It seems that our current economic growth is fueled by the twin trends of globalization and technology innovation that (for now) benefit highly skilled workers, but actually hurt the vast majority of the less skilled segments of the workforce.
Human beings fundamentally want to progress—we want to feel like we’re getting ahead. But according to the US Census Bureau, the average US family makes as much money as they did in 1989, and only 7% more than they did in 1973. Think about that for a moment—in the last 42 years, across nearly two generations, the average family saw a only a 7% pay raise, and in the last 26 years, they saw no raise at all. People feel like they’re not getting ahead...because most of them aren’t. It’s no wonder so many people feel so like the modern economy isn’t working for them.
Robots are replacing jobs faster than we expected
So what’s a reason for why this is happening? For one, robots are replacing jobs faster than we realized. Walmart recently cut 7,000 bookkeeping jobs due to automation while Foxconn replaced 60,000 jobs on the factory floor with robots this year, according to Digital Trends. This is a very real issue and it’s likely to worsen as technology improves. As we develop machines that are better, cheaper, and faster than humans, even more jobs will be lost.
And it’s not just blue-collar jobs that are at risk. White-collar jobs are equally in trouble. With the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), both low and high skills jobs are becoming automated. AI can now detect cancer cells on x-rays more effectively than human doctors. Bots write most of the social media posts on data-driven sports and finance content. This trend in automation is spreading quickly across all industries and will affect many different jobs from truck drivers and customer service reps to doctors and attorneys. The list of skilled jobs that will fall by the wayside is growing.
How do we retool workers for new jobs?
Technology innovation creates new jobs just as it replaces some. Think of all the positions that didn’t exist just ten years ago—social media manager, digital marketer, SEO specialist, app developer, cloud services specialist, or virtual reality game developer.
Addressing the skills gap is key for the next 5-10 years
Addressing the critical skills gap is going to be a key issue for the U.S. and world economy in the next 5-10 years. If we don’t figure out a way to adapt to the technology we create, we’ll have a potentially huge problem on our hands—companies that can’t grow due to shortages of new skills, employees resistant to technology change and as a result look for a new place to work, and workers whose skills are no longer relevant and useful.
Organizations will also require a new kind of Learning and Development (L&D) department—one that stays ahead of technology innovation, focuses on continuous learning, strategically up-skills existing employees for new jobs, and helps retools obsolete workers.
And companies must be more comfortable hiring outside the four-year college degree. New forms of learning, such as online courses and boot camps, can quickly re-skill workers and launch new careers.
Strategic public-private partnerships can help
Companies cannot address this wave of automation and its impact on jobs alone. It will take strategic public-private partnerships to identify and match laid off workers to appropriate new skills training. The World Economic Forum’s Global Challenge Initiative on Employment, Skills and Human Capital cooperates with industry to analyze skills needs and implement solutions, working closely with companies and governments worldwide.
For example, what kinds of jobs can laid-off Walmart bookkeepers retool easily for? They are good at numbers, so why not train them for the growing field of data science that’s in high demand by companies? It’s a perfect example of how automation may have taken a job away, while simultaneously creating a new job to make sense of all this data generated by machine learning.
Automation drives cost down and productivity up, but it’s a solution that presents it’s own set of new problems to solve. As we move into the future of learning and working, we must think about these consequences now so we can prepare our workforce to be as productive and happy as possible.