Sunday Posts

When we talk about automation, we usually imagine a future without jobs - except for a few nerds perhaps! Therefore, the conversation about this future centres around two things: One, on STEM training, so that more people can join the ranks of the nerds; Two, Universal Basic Income, or suchlike, on the assumption that the rest of the people will need support. So, if we flip the perspective now, and speak about Careers in the 2020s, how would it sound? Be an Engineer or a Gardener, sounds like the best we could do. But that wouldn't be much of an advice really, because most Engineers today work as number crunchers in Financial Services, jobs that are likely to go first, or Programmers in IT Services, jobs that will go next. As for Gardeners, there is global warming. But, seriously? Human beings have been pretty bad at predicting what happened to them in the future. True, in an earlier age, we did not have people who called them Futurists (though what they do, speculate, ...

There are things we know: That as technologies change rapidly, there is a hollowing out of the Middle Class jobs. Some jobs, like the Telephone Operator, have become extinct; some others, like Secretaries and Receptionists, have become less ubiquitous; and yet others, like the Book-keepers, are being driven into obsolesce. Just like automation of an earlier kind marginalised the factory worker (Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, remember), the automation is now coming for the middle class lives and suburban lifestyles. Even those jobs created by technologies - the Call Centre worker and others - are now facing competition from newer generations of technologies, such as Voice Recognition. And, the indication is that this will intensify further, and transform the domains that were hitherto deemed safe: Jobs such as Accountants, Taxi Drivers, Legal Clerks and even Waiters and Cooks. The economies that benefited greatly from the globalisation's last wave - India comes to mind - will be...

Over last several years, I have worked to find that Holy Grail of Education: A degree that leads directly to a Job! I did write about this search on this blog, all the dead ends, disappointments and revealations that came along the way. Starting with perfect innocence - that this is the best thing that can happen to corporations whose difficulty in finding skilled personnel - I came to learn the ground realities of the trade, that the skills gap is usually 'someone else's problem' and long-term solutions are no good for the managers focused on quarterly targets.  Despite this, however, I got somewhere. Almost implausibly (to me, at least), I got some advance commitments on hiring graduates we could train. It was a commitment with all the expected checks and balances, but that provided that keystone for building a demand-led degree. And, indeed, the first one is always the hardest: Once that one commitment was signed off, it was easier to have conversations with ot...

In my conversations about Skills Training and Employability, I have started using the SIM model. This is indeed based on my various conversations over the last five years with employers and educators, and attempts to understand why the Employment-to-Education gap persists. And, indeed, SIM is the shorthand for the three dimensions of this gap, Skills, Information and Mobility, which I wrote about earlier. ( See here ) Instead of seeing Education-to-Employment gap as a massive cognitive failure for the Educators, or an original sin emerging out of narrow self-serving attitudes of the employers, this model allows me to see why such a gap may exist. Indeed, over time, I have come to feel that I should be speaking about the problem in plural, or problems, because these three dimensions are really three distinct challenges to be overcome. And, anyone focusing on any one aspect of it is likely to be frustrated by the outcomes. Consider the frequent complaints from the Skills Traini...

Education does not readily translate into employment, hence there is a E2E gap, says McKinsey. It is a double whammy - we face an unemployment problem as well as a labour force problem - and causes all kinds of difficulties. On one hand, growing populations of young people, unable to find gainful employment, become disaffected. On the other, companies can not achieve optimum levels of production or service, and often operate sub par. This is a big problem, getting bigger, and this has resulted in some earnest discussion about all the elements of the E2E chain, flexible labour force strategies, more employment orientated education etc.  While the Skills gap - education is not creating enough skilled workers - gets the maximum exposure, it is only a partial reason for the E2E gap. The reasons why E2E gap exists can be classified in three parts - Skills, Information and Mobility (how is SIM for an acronym?).  Skills is a big problem, and educators endlessly debate why t...

I came across an interesting survey by National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), a not-for-profit group, which aims to determine what the employers want in graduates they hire. The survey draws upon a relatively small group of employers, there are only 260 respondents as reported in the Forbes article, and this includes a number of large corporations. The information coming out of the survey, as reported in Forbes, are somewhat obvious in itself. The most preferred degrees for the participating employers are in business, engineering and computer and information sciences. The skills that the employers prefer are the following (in order of preference): 1. Ability to work in a team structure 2. Ability to make decisions and solve problems (tie) 3. Ability to communicate verbally with people inside and outside an organization 4. Ability to plan, organize and prioritize work 5. Ability to obtain and process information 6. Ability to analyze quantitative data 7....

In my previous work on Education for Employment (links below), I pleaded the case to shift focus on to the goals and aspirations of the students, most of whom come to education with at least an implicit objective of getting into employment. My argument was primarily that Universities are designed, at least in a large way, to serve themselves, and all too often, the academia's focus is out of sync with that of the students. As a solution, I was arguing about a new paradigm for engagement with employers, keeping the student as the core focus rather than academic ambitions or the immediate needs of a particular employer.  The arguments from among academic colleagues rightly challenged the plausibility of such a shift, pointing that most businesses are driven by here-and-now requirements, while the academia may essentially need to take long run view for the sake of its students. There is indeed some merit in this argument, as the failed attempts to create a successful vocational ...

'Software is eating the world': Marc Andreessen said that and we see this everyday. It seems technology is marching into, in fact, creeping into, everything that we do. And, if it is eating anything, it is eating jobs, the solid middle class jobs we knew and still model our lives around, those of Secretaries, Administrators, Receptionists, Sales People, and all that. As is said, Microsoft Word has eaten more American jobs than India and China (and that's no consolation to India and China, because it will eventually, it is now, eating Indian and Chinese jobs too), and now this is extending into realms that we didn't think are possible. For the moment, Google's self-driving cars may not stand a chance in Mumbai or Lagos, but its arrival should eventually reorganise the trade of driving vehicles. The big issue in London today is that of closing ticket offices - with the implication of loss of Ticket Clerk jobs - and many stations today have only minimal ticket office...