How skills volunteering can help you succeed in the age of robots
Matteo Francesco Mascolo, Project Manager, The Good Lobby
If we imagine the future job market as an ecosystem, it will be one populated by both workers and robots.
Jobs are evolving rapidly and almost half of them are susceptible to automation. Particularly at risk are not only occupations involving routine, and in manufacturing, which are easily replicable by computer algorithms, but also non-routine tasks. These include a wide range of jobs, from legal writing, and sales, to car driving, and medical diagnoses. This has been seen as a threat to employment in the future, and has stoked fears of a jobless growth economy.
Whether these fears are justified or not, some questions are worth exploring: in this unpredictable scenario, who are the ones who are going to survive? How can workers keep up with the continuous changes in the labour market without losing the race with robots? And how can we eventually thrive?
Solution from the past
Luckily, our past provides a solution for the future.
There are long-established activities that can equip people with a variety of skills, making them more flexible, and therefore better able to survive in an unstable labour market, where jobs change quickly, or become automated.
Whether you call these activities pro bono, skill-sharing, or civic entrepreneurship, their common denominator is that they allow individuals to employ their skills on a voluntary basis, with no financial gain, to improve society.
The activities in question — skills-based volunteering — differ from traditional volunteering because they go beyond conventional forms of engagement, such as signing a petition, or making a donation. These traditional forms of engagement are limiting: they only allow individuals to participate in ready-made campaigns. They do not empower people to team up with others and to share their talents and entrepreneurial spirit in pursuit of the public interest.
Volunteering skills, instead, is about leveraging the expertise of individuals to address social causes they care about, usually in partnership with non-profit organisations.
The social cause one wishes to address does not matter. It might be public health, climate change, education, government accountability, LGTB rights, or animal welfare; what matters is that skills volunteering pushes individuals to go beyond the simple, one-click form of engagement, and enables them to deploy their experience, skills, ideas, entrepreneurial mind-set, and imagination to improve society.
A win-win for everyone
This is what I do at the Good Lobby, a pioneering advocacy and skill-sharing community committed to assist civil society organizations and grassroots in the pursuit of their public-interest goals. In this sense, skills-based volunteering also fosters new forms of civic engagement and paves the way for active citizenship.
The idea behind this type of volunteering is not new: several global movements committed to improve the state of the world, such Amnesty International, were born as skill-sharing communities.
Historically, it was a prerogative of wealthy people, who could afford to devote part of their time and expertise to the benefits of the many. Yet, today, the percentage of people receiving higher education is increasing widely; as such, volunteering is accessible to all individuals, who, regardless of their origin or background, wish to use their talents to make a positive difference in their communities. This is especially true for young people who are hungry to infuse their life with purpose, as well as to have social impact on the world around them and their future.
The millennial generation has valuable skills that can be channelled to create a better tomorrow. From drafting a provocative blog post, to designing a social media campaign, from setting up a website, to offering legal assistance to vulnerable groups, the idea of SBV is that anyone can dedicate part of their time, and offer their best talents to support a cause they care about and so generate social value.
Importantly, sharing skills does not benefit society only, but individuals, too, allowing them to thrive in a fast-changing, often unpredictable work ecosystem that has been defined as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Interestingly, the variety of challenges, tasks and circumstances people meet through volunteering enables them to develop an eclectic set of skills, most of which are among those that help people thrive in the era of automation. Here are some of them:
Coordinating with others — Volunteering activities often require collaborative actions to pursue public interest goals. People learn how to arrange their workload and link it to the overall workflow, how to establish priorities, and switch these according to circumstances, as well as how to overcome obstacles, and conflicts in partnership with others.
Cognitive flexibility — People learn how to work on several tasks simultaneously, inside and outside their professional environment. This enhances their cognitive flexibility, the ability to switch rapidly from one task to another, or to master multiple concepts at the same time. A person who is cognitively flexible is likely to learn faster, to be creative, and to react to new situations more effectively — all great assets in an unstable job market.
Negotiation — The ability to discuss, reconcile differences, and to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement. People who engage in volunteering are used to working with people from diverse backgrounds. They learn to mediate, and how to smooth conflicts to achieve common, public interest goals.
Service orientation — In volunteering, people devote their time to actively supporting social causes. This strengthens service orientation, or the predisposition of a person to be helpful and cooperative.
Complex problem solving – People use their skills — in coordination with others — to solve public problems. This advances a person’s ability to interpret complex situations and to find innovative solutions. This is particularly relevant in an ever-increasingly complex economy.
Social and emotional intelligence — A large part of volunteering involves working with people to achieve public interest goals. Thanks to this, people practise how to recognise and handle their emotions and behaviours, as well as how to successfully deal with those of others.
General skills people can acquire
Creativity — Creativity it is not an innate quality bestowed upon lucky humans, but a process one can ignite. Individuals who undertake skills-based volunteering are constantly exposed to a variety of challenges that require innovative solutions. They learn, together, how to adopt creative answers to solve public questions. Moreover, creativity is an essential component of civic entrepreneurship in so far as it requires people to develop ideas and turn them into specific projects aimed at serving the community. And it is worth noting, that according to the OECD, jobs involving creative skills are less vulnerable to automation.
Resiliency — Skills-based volunteering pushes people out of their comfort zones: it challenges them in various ways, and requires them to juggle work and non-work responsibilities. As such, volunteering tests the limits of individuals who must learn additional skills to overcome difficulties. This boosts resiliency, which is the ability to recover from setbacks, adapt to changes, and thrive despite adversity. This skill is particularly important in a fast-changing job market.
Empathy — This is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing and adjust our responses accordingly. Volunteering skills is a social activity performed in a team, which enhances a person’s ability to empathize with peers.
Empathy encapsulates most of the skills mentioned above. In fact, it encompasses critical thinking, social and emotional intelligence, as well as sensibility, which is arguably the most difficult skill to be replicated by robots. It is not a coincidence that jobs requiring empathy, judgment and analysis are the ones that have been growing the most since the 80s.
Adaptability / flexibility — Learning new skills through skills volunteering makes a person more flexible and adaptive, and so able to embrace the rapid changes of a fast-moving economy. An individual equipped with a wide range of skills is better able to interpret different roles in a fast-changing labour market, or to change careers swiftly and she or he is consequently less vulnerable to the effects of automation.
Darwin, skills and the future of work
Have you read?
- Technology is making us feel more alone. Is a return to volunteerism the answer?
- Why we need to harness the power of volunteers
- The economics of giving: do your emotions get in the way of helping others?
Darwin, skills and the future of work
Automation it is not the end of the world, nor does it represent the beginning of a jobless growth economy. On the contrary, machines push humans to develop their comparative advantage: specialising in creative, cognitive and social skills, which are hardly replicable by computers. After all, robots can perform outputs more efficiently, but humans remain in charge of allocating inputs.
It may sound simple, but in an era in when occupations change rapidly and many become automated, in order to survive, workers need to change accordingly. Paraphrasing Charles Darwin, in an uncertain job market, it is not the most educated who survive, but the most flexible, adaptable, resilient, and those with a wide range of skills to unleash. Skilled-based volunteering activities can make you thrive in this unpredictable ecosystem.
Originally published at www.weforum.org.
