We are living through a time of immense disruption the full scale of which we don’t yet fully understand. The pandemic has caused millions to lose their jobs and changed the business models of entire industries. Understanding the skills now needed in the labour market and the level of reskilling required is further complicated by the rise of artificial intelligence and automation.
So what does the future of work now look like and how can companies and individuals navigate the next few years?
My guest this week is Dr Michelle Weise, Senior Advisor at Imaginable Futures and author of the book, Long Life Learning – Preparing for jobs that don’t even exist yet. Michelle specialises in the future of work and the future of learning and has some incredibly valuable insights to share
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ A more positive vision for the future of work
▪ The lack of a common skills taxonomy
▪ Data infrastructure for talent mobility
▪ Why employers are struggling to articulate the skills they have and recognise the gaps
▪ The role of technology
▪ Restructuring the working day to enable reskilling
▪ Developing an “Education GPS”
▪ What does the future look like and how can we solve these problems
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:36]:
The ages of history. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 330 of the Recruiting Future podcast. We’re living through a time of immense disruption, the full scale of which we don’t yet fully understand. The pandemic has caused millions to lose their jobs and changed the business models of entire industries. Understanding the skills now needed in the labor market and the level of reskilling required is further complicated by the rise of artificial intelligence and automation. So what does the future of work now look like? And how can companies and individuals navigate the next few years? My guest this week is Dr. Michelle Weise, senior advisor at Imaginable Futures and author of the book Lifelong Learning Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet. Michelle specializes in the future of work and the future of learning and has some incredibly valuable insights to share. Hi Michelle and welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Michelle Weise [00:02:50]:
Hi Matt, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:02:52]:
I’m very well, thank you. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do.
Dr. Michelle Weise [00:02:59]:
Sure. I am Michelle Weise. I am a senior advisor at Imaginable Futures and I just wrote a book that’s called Long Life Learning Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet. And I was the former Chief Innovation Officer at Strada Education Network and their Institute for the Future of Work as well as at Southern New Hampshire University.
Matt Alder [00:03:20]:
Tell us about the book Long Life Learning. Why did you write it and what’s it about?
Dr. Michelle Weise [00:03:25]:
I have sort of hovered in this space that Straddles post secondary education and the workforce and have, you know, spent most of my career looking at people’s job transitions and how they launch into different careers. I kind of started off looking at service members and how they transition out of the military into civilian careers and then also looking at adult learners and workers who are not our typical college going learners, but are seeking out new skills to remain competitive in the workforce. And have studied a lot of the different kinds of literature on the future of work and future of education. So I’ve been in this space and have had this really unique vantage point of getting to see a lot of the different kinds of burgeoning innovations out there, especially in education technology and workforce technology. And I’ve probably seen, I don’t know, maybe 500 or 1000 different demos by different companies and organizations and universities. So it’s given me just kind of this unique perspective to look at the space. And I’ve also inhabited the, the roles of different stakeholders in our ecosystem. So I wanted to write this book to, to deliver a more positive vision of the future of work and show how we move to a better functioning ecosystem. I think when people read a lot of things about the future of work, it can start to get very dark. It can be kind of a little bit of fear mongering in terms of these are the millions upon millions of jobs that are going to become obsolete in the next year or next years. And what I wanted to do is show what happens when you actually shine a light on the workers themselves and the barriers that they face today. Because if we actually solve for those pain points that people are struggling or bumping up against today, we’ll actually build that better functioning ecosystem for all of us to leverage in the future. Because we can anticipate with a kind of longer, more turbulent work life that is shaped by rapid advancements in technology that we’re going to all have to kind of reskill and retool ourselves possibly 20, 30 times more than, you know, more in the future. And so how do we’re going to need some kind of reliable infrastructure to support lifelong learning. And this book is kind of how we get there.
Matt Alder [00:06:03]:
And in terms of work, how do you see that work has changed over the last few years and how has the pandemic changed that?
Dr. Michelle Weise [00:06:13]:
Yeah, so even as early as 2014 we could see that we were, soon we were shifting into this mode of having to prepare for jobs that had no. That prior just didn’t have a name for us. They didn’t exist. LinkedIn had shared that Some of their top job offerings or open jobs or the hottest jobs out there were jobs that just didn’t exist five years prior. Things like iOS or Android developer or UI, UX designer, social media, Internet cloud manager, big data architect. Right? These were things that just didn’t exist before. So as we think about, again, this kind of extended stay in the workforce that is also more difficult to navigate, how many more as yet unknown jobs are we going to have to prepare for? And what kind of skills do we actually need in order to thrive in that future? Now with the pandemic, what, what we’ve seen is all of the kind of prognosticating and forecasting about the future of war, it almost became moot, right? We were so worried about how AI and automation was going to kind of decimate different sort, different industries. Instead, what we saw was that a virus could do that same exact work and just turn out millions of workers and just leave them completely stranded. And what we saw was all of those kinds of cracks that we knew existed in our education and workforce infrastructure because we already had, at least in the United states, we had 41 million Americans who were not thriving in the labor market. They were not earning a living wage, they only had a high school degree. They were sort of stuck in this space. We already knew that prior to the pandemic. But when the pandemic hit, what it did is it just sort of showed the urgency of the work we needed to do because we saw how incredibly stuck people were, right? There were the retail and hospitality industries. Suddenly people had jobs that didn’t exist anymore, but they couldn’t necessarily transfer their skills easily into open opportunities. And so that it really made clear just how stark the challenges were in terms of we just lack the interstitial tissue to connect career navigation, better wraparound support services, more precise educational opportunities, and better connections to employers through more transparent and fair hiring practices. All of those fundamental cracks became clear. So those are precisely the things that we need to solve for today.
Matt Alder [00:08:59]:
There’s lots of things that I really want to dig into and ask you more about, but I suppose starting with the traditional education systems, it’s kind of been apparent for a while that there is this disconnect between education that’s offered in various countries around the world and actually the needs of employers or the way that work is working. What’s the problem and how do you think it might be fixed?
Dr. Michelle Weise [00:09:25]:
Part of it is a linguistic barrier. We do not have a common skills taxonomy that helps educators and training providers actually translate the skills that they are cultivating in their learners into the language of the labor market. So there’s really this kind of mismatch there. And it’s. And it’s huge, right, because they’re like, just think about how we post for job postings, right? There’s no standardized way of articulating the skills a person needs. Often when we actually do make a hire, that person we hire doesn’t actually reflect the job posting that we had used. Right. So there’s this kind of translation process that is unclear. I think also as we think about the skills we need for the future, it is both this kind of human and technical side that we see emerging in these hybrid skills that are in demand. So certainly, you know, you’ve heard people talk about how, you know, if there is sort of more roboticization, more machine learning infiltrating our work and changing, changing how we work and what we do for work, we may have to kind of leverage our uniquely human skills to remain competitive in the labor market. And it makes sense, right? You know, if we can exercise more judgment, more emotional intelligence, have better communication skills, that intuitively makes sense. But it’s. The problem is, you know, these are such broad skills that you can’t go match people to jobs based on being a great communicator because those kinds of skills are so domain specific. And so again, back to sort of the taxonomic problem or the, you know, the skills definition issue. You actually, right now we don’t, because we don’t have that kind of Rosetta Stone that we need. What we are kind of having to do is just sort of marry up some of the job postings data with people’s sort of social profile and resume data to say, oh, look, you know, the kinds of skills that these people are saying they have and that employers are saying they have by hiring them, you know, these skills of communication actually translate into something very specific like grief counseling or crisis counseling in behavioral health. And when you’re trying to get a job in pr, marketing and advertising, that communication skill, you know, means you have to be able to do some search engine optimization or some brand management, right? They have these different ways in which we signal that skill. So we’re having to kind of stitch together on the side ways of making this clear for both educators, job seekers and employers. And it’s a lot of kind of work around the edges when fundamentally we kind of need a better data infrastructure that supports these more direct connections between job seekers and the jobs that, that they really are skilled to do. Right. We have things we have a lot of intermediaries. Right now we have a $200 billion sort of talent middleman marketplace where we’re trying to get clear on how you connect talent to opportunity. But, but we haven’t sort of solved for this kind of fundamental constraint of, you know, how do we actually know if this person can do the work ahead? So there’s a lot of work to do in terms of language and a lot of work ahead in terms of how do we assess someone’s skills beyond just kind of leveraging a degree requirement? Right. How do we get more granular about the skill sets that people have so that we’re not constantly overlooking the talent in front of us?
Matt Alder [00:13:12]:
I suppose moving, you know, digging to that a little bit deeper just in terms of skills that employers have already within their organization. Organization or skills that they’re bringing into their organization. What I’ve noticed certainly in the last year is that things, things are now moving so quickly. It’s particularly in terms of things like digital transformation as companies are having to completely rethink the way they do business. As a result of everything that’s been been happening. There are lots of companies who’ve suddenly found that they don’t have the right skills within their organization. But actually they’ve also found that the people that they’re recruiting, they’re recruiting them for jobs that they don’t have skills for that they have to develop skills for for the future because things are changing so quickly. I mean, what’s your, what’s your take on that?
Dr. Michelle Weise [00:13:59]:
Yeah, it’s been this interesting phenomenon to see where companies believe they don’t have the workers with the right talent or the right skill sets. Right. They, but the, the thing is that workers need new skills and that reskilling has to come from somewhere. But the reflex with in companies for the last few decades has been this shift to buy and not build talent. Right. It was this kind of spot talent mentality of I’m going to get the exact person with the exact work experience and the number of years of experience in that space and hire that person who is external to my organization instead of trying to take someone who is maybe 70, 80% of the way there and help them fill those skills gaps. And we’ve really seen this kind of huge retreat and disinvestment from the re from reskilling our own people. I think Peter Capelli at Wharton talks about how in 1979, you know, people used to get two and a half weeks worth of training and then that dwindled down to only 11 hours per year by 1995. So we can only extrapolate from there, you know, where we might be today. And so few companies actually offer any sort of reskilling opportunities in house. If any kind of skills training happens, it’s usually around risk mitigation and compliance training. It’s not about building those new skills. And part of it is most companies don’t actually know what their people can do. They don’t have a granular, finer sense of the skills their people have beyond sort of more blunt job titles. It’s kind of incredible to see, you know, there are these different kinds of entrepreneurs out there who are building these different kinds of AI powered platforms like Hitch and Skyhive and Future Future Fit. And they’ve gone into companies, and even massive companies with hundreds of thousands of workers. They, they are, are sharing with these entrepreneurs that they have no idea what their people can do. So if they don’t have a sense of what their people can do, how can they figure, how can they, how can they kind of ro out as not having the skills to be able to do the work ahead? And so these platforms are helping these employers get a better sense of what talent they have at their fingertips and kind of helping these workers surface their skills and articulate their skills and they can actually then start to map them to the strategic goals of the company and help learners identify, you are 75% of the way there towards this new sort of quality assurance role or whatever the case may be. And it helps people identify those gaps in their knowledge and then connect them to different kinds of learning opportunities around them. They have these kinds of learning recommendation apps folded into them where some of them can curate content from, you know, 30,000 different educational institutions. So it kind of tries to sort of help a little bit better with the articulation of skills. The identification of different gaps that they may have helps learners and workers envision pathways forward, you know, and especially internal mobility pathways which we have not ever really been very clear and transparent about within companies, you know, telling people exactly what you need to do in order to advance. So it’s kind of building and illuminating these pathways through this skills based lens and giving both the enterprise kind of clarity into who they have now and how they shape them, you know, how they, how they kind of reallocate some of their resources to invest in, in those people. And then it also gives importantly the job seeker some sense of where they are, you know, the talents that they have today relative to where they want to go. So it’s Those kinds of things I think are exciting. Again, more nascent innovations now, but a way to start getting clearer on skills.
Matt Alder [00:18:05]:
And do you think that technology is the answer here? I mean, what are some of the solutions that you talk about in the book?
Dr. Michelle Weise [00:18:13]:
Yeah, so I’m not a technocrat. I don’t think that technology is sort of the be all, end all here. It is an enabler, definitely. And it also depends on what kind of size company we’re talking about. Right. I think a lot of times when we think about workforce development innovations, we tend to feature ones that really do work well in massive enterprises. Maybe not so well for most of the small and medium sized businesses out there who don’t have a substantial kind of reskilling program in house. I think the main thing that we need to scope out as we think about the work ahead is really a mindset shift and a behavioral change in how we think about the workday to date. We have kind of always put the onus on the individual or the job seeker or the worker to figure out and navigate their skills development on their own. Where, you know, basically almost 9 out of 10 adults see the need to reskill. They just don’t know where to go for that reskilling. And employers have really again, sort of retreated from offering those kinds of opportunities. But that really needs to change where we’re not going to always be able to just buy that external talent and recruit it. We need to kind of look within and mine that talent goal that we’re sitting on. And the way we need to do that beyond kind of getting clear on skills is carving out time, which is just the most fundamental barrier that people have to talent development is how are these people going to find the time to build these new skills. It’s unfair for employers to expect constantly that individuals do this on their own time. Right. As we think about having to do this over and over and over again, how do we instead embed different kinds of interventions in small learnings throughout the work week? Right. Every day that there’s some sort of maybe micro intervention or some sort of learning module that they can take. It’s bite sized pieces of learning. If they, if companies can’t afford to, you know, carve out an hour a day or an hour a week or whatever the number may be. This is the sort of first order constraint that we need to solve for. It’s not enough for us to sort of dangle tuition reimbursement or tuition assistance dollars for folks to again do this independently outside of the workday. How do we instead embed hands on experiential work based learning opportunities for people to build those skills?
Matt Alder [00:20:56]:
As you mentioned earlier, we’re currently in the position where there are people all over the world in a number of different industries who’ve lost their job and potentially lost their future in those jobs. As has sort of shifted so quickly and there’s, there’s no guarantee that those jobs or those industries will, will come back in the, in the same way. Obviously this is increasingly going to be a problem that, that we’re going to need to deal with as move forward through this year and the years after. What responsibility, what role do you think companies and governments and these sort of displaced individuals themselves should be, should be playing in this?
Dr. Michelle Weise [00:21:36]:
I don’t know if you remember back in August of 2019 when there was sort of a lot of hoopla made around this big business roundtable, you know, claim or you know, that was signed by all the, all the members who were part of this CEO organization where they said they weren’t going to prioritize the needs of their shareholders but instead kind of look and invest within, in their talent. And it sounds great in theory to be talking about these things and it is right on track, but it doesn’t mean anything unless we actually see how we are, you know, how that translates into action. So I think that is a, that is the key thing is how do we see employers changing their behavior in fundamental ways to embed these different kinds of reskilling pathways within. Right? It’s not enough. I mean, as fantastic as it is that there are these hundred million dollar initiatives at places like JPMorgan Chase or Amazon, these are exciting, but again, they haven’t yet solved for that issue of time. And I think what we’ve seen with the pandemic is all of us have incredible circumstances, you know, personal situations that get in the way of our work and our productivity and our ability to advance. Right there. There’s so much juggling that we are doing. And I think what has become clear through the pandemic is this notion of time poverty and how we kind of lack the amount of time to do the things that we need to do. And those who are sort of more well off can actually afford to pay to get back time. Right? We can outsource certain activities so we can retrieve some time. But as we think about the people who have really borne the brunt of the loss in jobs from this pandemic, right. It is, it is not the top 10%. It is again, this sort of Inequitable recovery, where the people who are hardest hit are the bottom 10% and they, you know, the bottom 50%, at least in the U.S. has borne the brunt of 80% of the jobs lost here. And I think the, these sorts of trends resonate throughout the world. And so again, these are the people who can’t afford to pay for time off to acquire new skills. So how do we, how do we truly kind of put some heft and you know, you know, see that action not just in talk and in these kinds of nice documents that people sign, but instead really seeing how that translates into enabling this kind of more equitable recovery.
Matt Alder [00:24:40]:
You mentioned right at the beginning that you had an optimistic view on the future of work. If we were having this conversation in three years time, what do you think things will look like by then or five years time?
Dr. Michelle Weise [00:24:56]:
Yes. So the reason why I have a lot of positivity about the future is we already see the incredible and the massive amount of innovation happening in the world today to try to solve for these issues. The challenge that we have come upon is that, you know, as we think about challenges in career navigation or better support services, or some of those more precise targeted educational opportunities, or more integrated earning and learning opportunities, or more skills based hiring practices, you know, these fair shots in the labor market, we can think of hundreds of different kinds of solutions in each of those spaces, these kinds of areas. We see a lot of problem solvers out there trying to build new solutions to make this more equitable or make this more transparent for job seekers. But a lot of the innovation to date has been happening in parallel with innovators with their heads down trying to win a certain market. And I think what we’re going to see in three years time ideally is just better orchestration, less reinvention of the wheel, where there’s a little bit more interstitial tissue that makes it so that any job seeker can easily navigate and understand all the solutions that are available to them. One of the things that kind of strikes me as someone who gets to see and get exposed to all this innovation out there. When I’m talking to innovators, an entrepreneur who’s working on a certain problem, I’ll ask them, do you know this person or this person? And it’s someone who’s working in that exact same space and they just have no awareness that they’re working on the same problem. Right. Everyone is kind of heads down, plowing ahead in silos. And I think what we really need to see more of is this orchestration this kind of way of making this a whole lot more seamless and comprehensible from the perspective of anyone you take, you know, off a sidewalk or, you know, if you ask them how are you going to kind of navigate your next job change, they will know that these solutions exist and they will know kind of who to reach out to, who to call, where to go for trusted advice, how to know if that pathway is actually legitimate and will get understood by an employer. Those are the kinds of questions we need to ask for job seekers. And none of that is clear today. You know, I think we just sort of expect people to get online and Google something, but there’s no way for us to kind of make sense of everything that is out there today and know what step to take next. So it’s again, how do we make this just more easily navigable, almost like an education GPS that we need for this kind of constant learn earn cycle.
Matt Alder [00:27:54]:
So final question. Where can people find you and where can they find the book?
Dr. Michelle Weise [00:27:59]:
So the book is available on, you know, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Wiley, Porchlight Books, a million most places where you buy books. And if people want to get in touch with me, they can reach out on Twitter or LinkedIn. My handle is rwmichelle and I have a website that’s called Riseand Design IO.
Matt Alder [00:28:20]:
Michelle, thank you very much for talking to me.
Dr. Michelle Weise [00:28:22]:
Thanks so much for having me, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:28:24]:
My thanks to Michelle. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for recruiting future. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
