Why “Skilling Up” Is the Only Option for the Digital Revolution

The following is adapted from Winning the Long Competition, by Alan Pentz.

As we enter the age of 5G, it is crucial that the United States invest in “skilling up” its rural and urban workforce. Industries are increasingly automated, and jobs are more likely to be coding, robot programming, and maintenance requiring technical skills.

Skilling up our workforce at every level is the only option we have.

According to the World Economic Forum, 65 percent of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist. Technology leadership in the Fourth Industrial Revolution begins with education. Many of our institutions of higher learning have been devastated by COVID-19, and our model leading into the pandemic didn’t exactly appear that sustainable. Higher education costs have risen eight times faster than wages in recent decades. While the wage premium for college graduates still tends to make the cost worthwhile, the gain is increasingly eaten up by the colleges themselves.

The cost of goods imported from China might have contributed to low inflation in recent decades, but the cost of services like education, which we do not import from low-wage countries, has risen. This situation has led to a bifurcated experience where the things we want are cheap but the things we need (housing, education, healthcare) grow ever more expensive. As technology accelerates, leaving workers without the ability to refresh their skills is all the more dangerous. Workers need access to continuing education not just for four years, but for their entire professional lives.

The college model will not go away. It still makes sense for a portion of our population. Those institutions are also the backbone of our research and development capability in the United States, so I’m not calling for their shutdown or impoverishment.

What we need is a system for the rest that allows us to skill up and retrain workers over the course of their careers. Our technical schools and community colleges need a massive overhaul. We also need to explore the German model, where the government and companies share the costs of employees during an internship or apprenticeship period that includes work and classroom training. We also might need to cycle through several periods of apprenticeship over our careers. This goal conflicts with the very premise of our current system of education as an early life activity.

5G itself will enable some of these shifts and ensure they are affordable. Although online education doesn’t feel great today, the advancements in telepresence and virtual reality will make educating learners remotely a far more “in-person-like” experience. We can educate workers in shorter and more effective bursts. We can also tailor education more individually at scale. The techniques that work for an eighteen-year-old valedictorian will not be the same ones that are most effective for a fifty-five-year-old mechanic learning to maintain a new fleet of autonomous vehicles.

Additionally, 5G technology will allow instructors to leverage their time and salaries across more learners and get better results at a far lower cost. These same benefits should flow down to our secondary schools as well. A growth in educational productivity is sorely needed, and without it, we may not win the long competition for technological dominance.

Congress must find common ground to make the investments to enable better and more ongoing technical education and to revolutionize instruction through 5G technology. If we can do this, the return on investment will be enormous. We’ll dwarf the incredible gains from last century’s GI Bill that educated the Great Generation returning from World War II, which from the end of the war through 1956, helped educate 16 million Americans and was one of the drivers of our post WWII prosperity.

In the words of the historian, Ed Humes, “The GI Bill provided the education for fourteen Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, a dozen senators, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners.”

In the wake of COVID and in the face of a looming competition with China, we need a similar approach. Without these investments, we risk creating a shortage of qualified labor and a disenfranchised underclass made up of the noncompetitive underemployed.

For more advice on skilling up, you can find Winning the Long Competition on Amazon.

Alan Pentz is the founder and CEO of Corner Alliance, a federally focused consulting firm supporting government innovation and R&D, particularly in the area of broadband adoption. Corner Alliance helped establish the FirstNet network for first responders and is working with the USDA to provide broadband to underserved rural areas. The firm also works with the Department of Commerce, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Department of Homeland Security. Alan previously worked as the speechwriter for Senator Max Baucus, who later became ambassador to China under President Obama. Alan received his MBA from UT-Austin.