The head of Siemens USA explains why it’s making open-source training programs available across industries, as it looks to benefit from a new age of automation
We’re in the early stages of what the World Economic Forum calls “the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” As automation replaces jobs and advanced technologies create new ones, the developed world is being forced to rethink the way it educates students and trains workers.
Barbara Humpton, as CEO of German engineering conglomerate Siemens’ US subsidiary, is at the forefront of this transformation. Her company is creating both the technologies changing the workforce and the training programs needed in response to them. And in the US, her 50,000 employees are already benefitting from the re-skilling programs they’re building for their clients.
Humpton also serves alongside CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook and IBM’s Ginni Rometty on the White House’s Workforce Advisory Board, which is focused on sharing training best practices that can be used around the country.
Humpton recently spoke with Business Insider about why she’s hopeful that investing in workforce education and training can be the No. 1 bipartisan issue in America (a topic highlighted as crucial to the labor force in the White House’s annual economic report for 2019). Then, ahead of her one-year anniversary as CEO, she discussed what she considers to be the most important leadership insight of her career.
The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
Richard Feloni: It seems to me that over the last year or two, the hysteria over automation and AI has shifting more to, “We actually do have tools that we can address this transformation of the workforce with and it’s not hopeless.” Where do you stand on this?
Barbara Humpton: Let me step back for a minute and give our perspective on what’s actually happening with technology today. Siemens is over 170 years old, and has been a catalyst in each of the previous industrial revolutions. Now, we’ve got more than a front row seat: We’re actually in the game helping to introduce new tools.
What we’ve seen with every previous industrial revolution is that yes, there’s been a massive shift and change, but what has resulted is dramatic creation of wealth, dramatic creation of opportunity for populations who had previously not been able to engage. We’re every bit as confident that this industrial revolution brings the same thing. Yes, it changes the way we work, but in very simple terms what’s going on is that we’re elevating the role of the human in the overall process of making things.
If everybody can accept the fact that yeah, these are powerful tools being brought to the table that make us more productive and allow us to create things that have never been possible before, then the question is, how do we really manage a workforce so that we don’t leave anybody behind?
And it hit me yesterday that, not only do we need to be talking about not leaving people behind, there’s also a certain element of this that you don’t want to leave behind businesses, either.
We’ve traditionally been engaged in building the big equipment that moves people, that powers grids, etc. But about 10 years ago, the leaders of the corporation realized that this digital transformation was on the horizon and they began making acquisitions of software companies. Now we’re one of the top 10 software companies in the world.
What we have to offer businesses is that we can help companies in their digital transformation, and then we’ve been building up a framework for helping people to re-skill, not only for our own employees but for theirs.
Lifelong learning needs to be an accepted reality of life today. You know, in today’s world none of us can rely on an education system to teach us what we need to know in our twenties and then expect to be able to ride that until we finish our careers. When careers lasted 30 years and technology wasn’t transforming so fast, maybe that was possible.
Feloni: Will this training have to take place within companies?
Humpton: Well, I’ll put on the table that I think it should.
