When you talk of the skills gap, it’s likely you’re talking of the high-tech, STEM-related skills that employers around the world bemoan the lack of in the labor market. What is perhaps less commonly meant by the phrase is the growing disparity between those with high skill levels and their lower skilled peers. Political phenomenon from Brexit to Donald Trump have shone a light on those people who have not benefited from what globalisation has to offer and who have used the ballot box to show their discontent, with voters in de-industrialized regions voting for those who pledge to rock the status quo.
This dissatisfaction is not that surprising. Research into the tremendous contraction of the mining industry in the UK found that just 25% of former miners had a full-time job a decade after their mine shut down. Such prolonged unemployment has well documented impacts on the physical and mental health of people, yet despite many workers in industralized industries not being particularly keen on the work they did, few have managed to transition into new forms of work.
Despite this clear evidence of failure, plus the signal given by recent elections, there is little real sign that governments across the western world are upping their effort to help support lower skilled workers in their efforts to ward off labor market competition that ranges from low-wage rivals overseas to increasingly capable machines.
Various studies have identified this group as most at risk from both forms of competition, yet they are also the least likely to engage in the kind of training that might help them to fight off this competition. What’s more, this lack of engagement isn’t just found with the kind of traditional bricks and mortar education that is increasingly expensive and unavailable to large portions of society, but also online variants that offer cost-effective and modular ways of learning.
Studies have identified a range of challenges that society needs to overcome if people are to access the training they so desperately need, including concerns around confidence, belonging, having sufficient time, and of course, money.
Racing to keep up
This situation is damaging enough at the moment, but given the increasingly rapid pace of technological change, it’s a situation that will create an ever widening skills gap if it is not addressed as soon as possible. We are living in a world typified by the Matthew Effect, whereby those with means and capabilities capitalize on the opportunities presented by new technologies to bound ever further ahead of those who have neither.
It’s led to the creation of a new initiative, called Closing the Skill Gap 2020, which urges companies to train, reskill and upskill both the current and future workforce. The project has already received commitments from companies to train over 8 million people, with an ultimate goal to surpass 10 million by 2020. Tata Consulting is one of the signatories, and they alone aim to impact over 1.2 million people via their work.
“We consider it not only a moral obligation, but the fundamental ethos of our business to ensure we bring all our stakeholders along on this new journey,” they say.
Even this effort, admirable though it is, is likely to target primarily those already in the Tata workforce, although they are making efforts to empower women, minorities and underserved groups via the goIT & Ignite My Future in School projects, both of which aim to serve those in underserved or underrepresented areas. The company has also launched the Million Women Mentors initiative, which has connected 1 million industry professionals with young women to act as role models and mentors since its launch in 2014.
The role of universities
The scale of the challenge was outlined by HEC’s Professor of Management Michael Segalla. When I spoke to him recently, he outlined how poor the returns are on training offered after someone has lost their job.
“Perhaps the top reason is that if someone was capable of being, let’s say a physicist, they would have already studied for this or a similar occupation,” he told me. “A college drop out working on an injected plastic forming production line is not going to go back to school at 38 and move up a standard deviation in the job market.”
With that in mind, he believes it would be a mistake for universities to turn into trade schools, and that instead, what will really support society is an ability to reflect more effectively on the past and project into the future. If universities become extensions of high schools, he doesn’t believe students will gain the right kind of training to be sufficiently agile and adaptable to changes in the workplace.
“What universities might want to include in their curricula is more content about how to ethically and sensitively approach the human disruption caused by new technology,” he continues. “Moving away from a Luddite approach that technology kills jobs to one that embraces the opportunity for more leisure (who really needs to work 70 hours a week anyway?) that could be used creatively and usefully should be the focus of at least a class or two.”
It’s probably fair to say that few countries or regions managed industrial transitions in the past, with few achieving significantly better results than those achieved among British mining communities. As the pace of change increases however, it’s a skill that societies rapidly need to develop.
