The Future of Work is Now
Technology has been transforming the workplace for years, but the shrinking labor market caused by the COVID-19 pandemic illuminates the urgent need for governments and the private sector to form powerful partnerships to create a diverse and skilled pool of talent.
The following is a conversation between Lorraine Hariton, CEO of Catalyst, a nonprofit that works with leading organizations to advance women in the workplace, and Mona Mourshed, CEO of Generation, a nonprofit that focuses on recruiting, training and placing disconnected learners in jobs. While this dialogue was facilitated in late 2019, the two leaders’ thoughts on how to build the workforce of the future will resonate in 2020 and beyond.
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Lorraine: People talk about the future of work, but the reality is that the future of work is here already. Technology is rapidly changing the nature of work and almost every global corporation has a major effort around this. We’re going to be working more intimately with technology and that is going to require a real focus on skills that are not only technology skills, but also what we call 21st century soft skills. Everyone will have to have data and digital literacy to be effective, as well as a series of soft skills: creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking. Now, conceptual skills and people skills are going to be even more important.
Mona: In my mind, it is much less about the future of work. It’s about the now of work. Research shows that anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of job activities for any given role are changing, and that’s the focus of a lot of upskilling and reskilling. There are also new job categories that are being created and jobs that are going to decline because there just isn’t a need for them. Reskilling efforts should focus on the activities needed for the role because the activities require you to integrate the technical skills, the behavioral skills, the mindsets — it’s what you are calling 21st century skills.
Lorraine: I totally agree, and we call this experiential learning. I was recently working with college students on building entrepreneurship skills on a global basis. They were really focused on how this exercise, which is in addition to what the colleges are teaching, helps students develop the experiential learning they need to integrate skills and be lifelong learners.
Mona: We very much see that. Just speaking about higher education, I think one of the trends that I expect we will see is a population of learners who are going to be certified through shorter-duration programs to do a particular role. And then afterwards, potentially think about what further university degree they might want, as opposed to today’s norm, which is the reverse. You now start to see people, in particular youth, making different choices about what they study, the sequence of how they study and how quickly they go into the job market versus taking the four years to get a degree.
Lorraine: I think education has to be reinvented at every place along the continuum. There’s more need for public-private partnerships where companies work with community colleges and high schools to really help shape education. There will be more fluidity because things will be changing so rapidly. Today, being a Java coder may be the hot thing to do, but 10 years from now you’re going to be obsolete. That’s why these fundamental transferrable skills called 21st century skills are really critical. Companies have a very active role to play in driving the education process. Because with the workforce shortage right now, it’s going to be incumbent on corporations to play a much more active role in shaping the education process and also incumbent on all of us to be active learners across our whole lifetime.
Mona: There is no question that the kind of system change that we’re talking about requires a very vibrant partnership between employers, government, education and training providers, and the learners themselves. A shift of this magnitude requires all of these parties to come to the table in a different way. What does that mean? In some cases, government funding is heavily driven by inputs. How many people are being trained to do X as opposed to actual employment traits, or being able to achieve an income uplift of X, Y and Z for particular learners? There needs to be much more of an outcomes orientation that’s driving these types of partnerships. Unless you’re actually living in each other’s shoes — you have employers coming into the classroom and you have education and training providers in the workplace — it is very difficult to come to an agenda with learners whereby they actually learn what they need to be able to perform. Partnerships will become, and will have to become, much more of a contact sport as opposed to arms-length, which is often the case today.
Lorraine: There is a lot of experimentation that’s going on right now. Organizations like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation are a perfect vehicle for sharing best practices and learnings across the region. It has a role in looking at cities, school districts, campus locations and corporations that are really getting it right and finding how to scale and replicate them.
Mona: Increasingly, we also have to understand what an inclusive business environment looks like. It is about having an environment where, irrespective of the profile, socioeconomic background and educational background of the learners, they are able to thrive based on what they do. One of the things that we do at Generation is to try to take the alternative profile. For example, the female representation in tech is often much less than desired. In Spain, 60 percent of our tech graduates are female and within the workforce, less than 10 percent are female. It’s being able to take someone — whose CV would not normally make it through — to the point of not just getting the job, but thriving. We have to be open to alternative profiles.
Lorraine: Catalyst’s mission is advancing women through workforce inclusion. For the last 57 years, we’ve been focusing on what it is to accomplish that. What we’ve come to understand is that it’s not just about diversity, it’s about creating an inclusive environment where people can bring their best selves to work, be productive, be part of the team, have voices heard and be able to be effective.
Mona: Just to echo that, it is everything from recruiting to the on-the-job experience and support — how your manager supports you, how your colleagues engage with you — to the evaluation process and the growth process.
Lorraine: And, men have to be involved and take ownership for this. As you get higher up in the pyramid in Fortune 500 companies, where the power is, men still dominate. We are at a high of 7.2 percent of the CEOs being women. When you get to middle management, it’s about 25 percent, and down at the base of the pyramid you have almost equity. We have a program called MARC (Men Advocating Real Change) that is helping men understand how to really have ownership and drive this change. Most men are excited about that, but they don’t know how to do it. I also think large corporations are in a unique position to drive this because they have people in different regions who need to work as a cohesive team. The intersectionality of gender, race and ethnicity is different in every jurisdiction. How to build inclusive environments with all that diversity is something that needs to be mastered.
Mona: If I can just offer a perspective from the front-line, how do we increase female representation in professions that today are male-dominated? It could be machine operators, or it could be STEM professions like Java developers or digital marketers. Being able to have a high share of female graduates going into those professions requires making sure that we’re doing two things. First, working closely with managers so that there is a positive and embracing environment for the females and the males. Second, figuring out what levers are required to increase accessibility of females to these professions. Sixty percent of our females are going into professions that today are only 7 to 8 percent female. And as I said, it requires working across multiple levers within the organization to get the female to that job.
Lorraine: Looking at the pipeline of talent, we need to get rid of cultural bias about what type of jobs women and men aspire to. We have a tremendous opportunity with data literacy and data analytics as a clean slate. Research shows that girls are very good at data analytics, where future jobs are headed. We have a lot of opportunities to make those cultural changes for women to have equity in the future and make sure governments, corporations and educational institutions are aware and overthinking this.
Mona: Lorraine, you’re making me think of the scientist tests. This is the test where you ask children to draw a picture of a scientist. On average, both boys and girls tend to draw pictures of males as the scientist. I actually did this with my daughter, who’s seven. I was very thankful that she drew a female, she drew herself as a scientist.
Lorraine: It varies by nation too. I remember I went to a girls’ middle school in India and I asked them, what do they want to be when they grow up? About 60 percent wanted to be doctors, about 30 percent wanted to be computer scientists. I thought that was very interesting. Very different than what you would have if you went to a U.S. middle school.
Mona: What would you, Lorraine, say, would be the most important agenda in the next three years to make sure women are set up for success in the reskilling effort?
Lorraine: CEOs need to proactively look at their reskilling and hiring plans, be open-minded and intentional, and disrupt bias in the hiring, promotion and skilling process. They need to do that if they want an effective workforce for them in the future.
Mona: I would say similarly that that’s true across all levels of the organization. Whenever there is a time of disruption, this is the best time to break through bias barriers. Be it gender, race, whatever it might be.
