Nearly 100% of the jobs created during the economic recovery went to workers with postsecondary education training. That training really begins in high school. The work of the future will require a robust system of lifelong learning and high school may just be the fulcrum in that system, best positioned to make the necessary profound changes across the system.
Right now, the university degree is the new high school diploma. It is the best proxy we have, but it remains insufficient. Four out of five CEOs say that skills gaps in creativity and problem solving make hiring difficult and nearly half of job tasks may be lost to automation within the next two decades. While we have substantial technical skills gaps we also have a profound shortage of non-technical, uniquely human skills such as empathy, social intelligence, creativity, communication and judgment among others. The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce predicted that without changes to our postsecondary education system immediately, our economy will be short 5 million workers by 2020. This is not new information but our responses to these challenges are insufficient. Merely pushing more people on the existing factory pipeline through higher education is not working. Nor are efforts to retrain those displaced in short-term skill acquisition boot camps. We need to start thinking differently.
The first industrial revolution was steam, the second was electrification and mass production, and the third was the advent of computerized technologies and with it the automation of physical labor such as manufacturing. The fourth industrial revolution will be marked by many advances in many forms of technology but most notably the automation of cognitive labor. Anything mentally routine or predictable, no matter how cognitively intense, can and will be achieved by some form of technology. As a result, we need to think differently about what work humans best address and how we prepare them for that work.
The End of The Occupation Identity
We ask young children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and we ask university students to select their major prior to any higher education exploration or experiences. This line of questioning asks the individual to pick an aspirational future self based upon existing careers and to work towards realizing that static vision. Becoming that future self is a process of acquiring codified existing skills and knowledge. This worked in the past when occupations had so much durability that they spanned multiple generations and served as the basis of our surnames. According to research by the Foundation For Young Australians,in the developed world, today’s young people may have upwards of 17 jobs across five different industries in a single generation. Many of those jobs do not yet exist and those that do will be rapidly and radically reshaped by technology. We need to think differently about how we define ourselves beyond a one-time application of skills and knowledge in a single set career.
If the future of work includes 15 or more jobs per person—we must rethink how we define ourselves. This will require a shift from a set identity bestowed by external validation (degree, job title, company affiliation) and focused around the application of skills and knowledge at a moment in time to an identity formed from internal validation rooted in purpose, passion, uniquely human skills, and fundamental literacies. This new work mindset will require a heightened level of self -awareness about one’s ability and methods for learning, adaptation, and value creation. This is a shift from learning to do to learning in order to continuously learn and adapt. This is a shift from storing stocks of knowledge to working in flows of emerging knowledge with a trans-disciplinary mindset of human and technology collaboration. This is analogous to learning to master a single instrument versus learning to conduct an orchestra.
