We seemed to have a bit of a lull in papers exploring the future of work, but the last month has seen three (from the Trades Union Congress, the Royal Society and the WEF) come out suggesting the topic is far from exhausted. The WEF have been frequent contributors on the topic, so what did their latest paper have to say?
The report was based upon a survey conducted with Chief Human Resources and Chief Executive Officers of multinational companies. The survey aimed to understand the current composition of company’s workforce, both in terms of man and machine, and also how they envision this changing up to 2022.
“In particular, the survey asks employers to rate the likelihood of employing a variety of strategies aimed at ensuring their businesses have the right talent to grow, to give specificity to the scale of their future reskilling needs, and to share a range of detailed information about their current and future reskilling provision,” the authors say.
Saying and doing
Now, there is an obvious caveat in the sense that there is often a large gap between what we say we will do, and what we actually do, so there has to be an element of doubt as a result of that, but nonetheless, the findings are relatively interesting.
The headline finding of the report is that those executives believe that roughly half of the tasks currently performed at work will be automated by 2025. This compares to roughly 29% of the tasks we do today. That’s an important distinction to make, as obviously having machines do 29% of the tasks we do now hasn’t resulted in 29% unemployment rates, or anything even remotely close.
This distinction between specific tasks being automated rather than entire jobs is important, as it’s a level of nuance that was largely lacking from earlier papers on this topic.
The second major headline finding is that new technologies will have a positive net impact on jobs. Whilst the authors predict that 75 million jobs might be displaced by 2022, they also believe 133 million new jobs will be created.
The need for training
Such changes will disrupt the labor market however and require a large amount of adaptation from workers. Unlike the TUC paper, the WEF report focuses intensively on the need for training and development of people so that they can work effectively alongside new technologies.
It’s not entirely clear that employers are willing or able to support that development however. According to the survey, around half of companies plan to reskill workers in key roles, with this falling to around a third reskilling all workers whose work is at risk of automation.
Indeed, for many companies, their preferred strategy was undeniably to hire in talent already trained and ready to go rather than developing the workers already on the payroll. The risks are especially pronounced for those whose jobs are most at risk.
“Our findings corroborate a range of recent research indicating that, currently, only about 30% of employees in today’s job roles with the highest probability of technological disruption have received any kind of professional training over the past 12 months,” the authors say.
Social risk
What’s more, such people are also three times less likely to their less exposed peers to have participated in on-the-job training or distance learning, and were twice less likely to have done any formal education. It’s a topic I’ve touched on in a previous post, with research from the UK Government Office for Science highlighting the divide between those who need training most and those who engage in training.
It’s a cause of concern, both from a corporate but also societal level, and this concern is heightened by the apparent ignorance of the issue by groups such as the TUC, who have traditionally been the support network for lower skilled workers.
There is a real risk that organizations and individuals who get the changing winds will invest in the training they need, whereas those who don’t will be rapidly left behind. Western society has already experienced some of the blowback from this, and there is surely considerable risk of this getting worse if matters don’t change.
While there is a commendable rise in programs being offered by the more advanced companies, especially in technical areas where skills are short, these are not spreading widely across society. There exists a clear need for government, trade unions or other organizations to step in and fill that gap, but to date there appears to be little evidence that such groups are willing or able to do so.
The WEF report provides another clarion call for such actions to occur, but it joins a growing chorus for change that has thus far largely fallen on deaf ears. Hopefully in time, the chorus will be too large to ignore. Time will tell if change comes in time.
