Learning in the age of automation begins with reskilling the workforce
“The age of automation” conjures thoughts of robots packing goods, managing mundane household tasks, even performing surgery. Yet while more efficient mechanization of physical tasks is a key element of the age of automation, it’s not the only change radically disrupting the world as we know it.
Whether it’s called “the Age of Automation,” “the Age of Artificial Intelligence [AI]” or “the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” this new era encompasses far more than mechanization. Today, cognitive technologies are challenging “human supremacy in a growing number of fields.”1 While the early age of automation disrupted blue-collar workers, new AI capabilities are rapidly changing white-collar job roles.
As reported in Forbes in June 2019, 500 million knowledge workers may be at risk in the coming years, as tasks previously performed by humans can now be completed faster and more accurately by software. And because software is cheaper and faster to both create and repair than physical robots, white-collar workers may be replaced even faster than their blue-collar counterparts.2
The age of automation is affecting every type of worker, in every country. According to McKinsey & Company, the current upheaval in the world of work is “akin to … the large-scale shift from agricultural work to manufacturing that occurred in the early 20th century in North America and Europe and more recently in China.” However, while previous industrial revolutions took place over many years, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by rapid and unprecedented change.
This rapid rate of change leaves organizations and workers who aren’t ready to adapt now with few opportunities to catch up. However, while “catching up” is not a viable option, preparing is. Organizations that take action now will enable higher efficiency, higher production at a lower cost, greater access to data, and most importantly, the opportunity to engage workers in more interesting, higher cognitive and creative work — the kind that helps organizations compete in a constantly changing economy.
What does it mean, in a practical sense, to prepare for the age of automation? Success in this new era isn’t solely dependent on implementing the right technology. Forward-thinking organizations know that, despite its moniker, “the age of automation” is really all about people.
The early age of automation
Increased automation capabilities were embraced by many business and intellectual leaders of the 20th century. Buckminster Fuller, inventor, architect and futurist, supported technological inventions for their potential to free humans from the need to be “employed at some kind of drudgery,”3 thus enabling people to engage in more creative, intellectual pursuits.
While Fuller viewed the increased use of technology as a way to unleash humanity’s potential, others were already anticipating technology’s potentially detrimental effects on the job market, even as they welcomed the opportunity for more efficiency. In 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon began advocating for a universal basic income for American families, partially to prepare for job loss through the increased use of technology. More recently, labor leader Andy Stern called for a universal basic income to address the anticipated wave of “joblessness” due to both the increase in use of AI and the gig economy.4
Fuller, Nixon, and Stern were prescient in anticipating the state of work today: According to the World Economic Forum, 75 million current roles could be displaced by technology.5 Yet most experts agree that humans are still quite necessary to the future of work. According to author, researcher and human resources (HR) expert Ben Eubanks, “Automation is really great for certain tasks and completely terrible for others. Experience shows us that trying to substitute every human action with an automated one is probably a bad idea.”
Why human beings are still necessary in the age of automation
In a time when automation seems synonymous with forward thinking, organizations are reluctant to share automation failures. Yet it’s these failures — Eubanks’ “bad ideas” — that illustrate most clearly how and why human beings are still integral to the future of work.
Consider the story of a company that designed a recruiting algorithm to find and hire hundreds of software engineers. The algorithm offered an assessment to any candidate with a resume that featured specific words and qualifications. If a candidate passed the assessment, the system automatically generated a job offer. All of this happened without candidates interacting with a human being, recruiter, HR lead or manager. Use of the algorithm resulted in some candidates being recommended for roles for which they were significantly unqualified.
“When HR leaders hear about this story, they’re horrified. And the same reason it scares them is the same reason it scares me,” Eubanks says. “If you’re using an algorithm to hire, how do you know who the person really is? Is the person you’re hiring the same person who took the test? Are they a good fit culturally for the company? Do they share the same vision? Do they work well with others? Do they fit the kind of key things we’re looking for in this position, or are they just good test takers? We need to be using technology to create more personal, more human interactions, creating the right human experiences.”
In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, increased AI and automation capabilities aren’t always the right solution to business challenges. Yet the question remains, when data entry, analysis and other previously “human” tasks are increasingly performed by AI tools, what can the employees of 2025 and beyond expect to bring to the workplace?
Plenty, according to Richard Baldwin, author of “The Globotics Upheaval” and professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. “If you want to know what we will be doing, you have to look at what AI can’t do. [AI still can’t] deal with unknown situations, can’t apply empathy or ethics, or be creative, or manage many people, or motivate many people or educate people,” says Baldwin. “What we will be doing is the most human of our tasks. … That’s why I say the future of work is very good.”6
Employees need reskilling on hard and soft skills
At its core, thriving in the age of automation requires rapidly and continuously reskilling employees to perform the work that technology can’t do. And yet while reskilling seems like a simple enough prescription for effective adaption to technological disruption, in reality it is far more complex. For centuries, people have been trained on primarily hard skills, with soft skills — empathy, curiosity, critical thinking — hopefully learned through a sort of cultural osmosis. In the future of work, people will need both these very human soft skills and an abundance of new hard skills to keep pace with and remain relevant in the age of automation.3
However, traditional education in the workplace has long prioritized rote learning, not problem solving or innovation, key skills needed for the future. Organizations looking to thrive in the age of automation must not only reskill employees but reskill them in new ways — nurturing rather than stifling creativity in the workplace, using training and management methods that promote problem-solving techniques rather than repetition of concepts.
Fortunately, leading organizations are aware of the urgent need for reskilling. A 2017 survey by McKinsey discovered that among a group of 300 executives at companies with more than $100 million in annual revenues, 66 percent saw “‘addressing potential skills gaps related to automation/digitization’ within their workforces as at least a “top-ten priority.”7
Some organizations have transcended awareness and are already taking action, investing heavily in large-scale reskilling programs. JPMorgan Chase recently invested $350 million in a 5-year global initiative called “New Skills at Work.” The investment will help create new training programs, bolster collaboration and communication between employers and educators, enable research about skills gaps, and build upskilling opportunities.8
Amazon is also committed to reskilling employees. The company pledged to spend $700 million to train 100,000 workers by 2025. The initiative, “Upskilling 2025,” will reskill employees across all areas of the organization, including corporate, warehouse, retail and transportation.9
According to Ardine Williams, vice president, Workforce Development, HQ2 at Amazon, as quoted in Wired magazine, Amazon’s investment isn’t about creating a “job ladder from fulfillment center to CEO, but rather to meet employees where they are and to create opportunities for them to build on the skills that they have.”10
Up-skilling 2025 will also help Amazon create more skilled workers as the talent shortage intensifies: Despite being ranked as one of the most desirable employers in the country, even Amazon had 20,000 jobs still unfilled as of July 2019.11
Preparing the workforce for the age of automation
JPMorgan Chase, Amazon and others also know that, despite the seemingly contradictory predictions of the talent shortage (due to a lack of relevant skills) and the job shortage (due to technology’s increasing prowess), employers will not be able to simply hire the right workforce in the age of automation. Thriving in 2025 and beyond will require a new approach to employee management, one that prioritizes learning and development to ensure that (1) workers always have the necessary skills in a rapidly changing economy, and (2) workers remain engaged and loyal, despite more opportunities from the competition.
While leading firms are investing in reskilling, many organizations have yet to begin. According to Eubanks, this delay could be devastating. “As human beings, we overestimate how much work we can do. We overestimate how quickly we can catch up if we fall behind. In the context of the age of automation and reskilling, organizations won’t fall behind overnight. They’ll fall behind slowly, until it’s too late to catch up. The problem is, with the age of automation, that if you get behind on something this big — reskilling — you can’t double or triple your pace to keep up. People can’t adapt that fast. And organizations probably don’t have enough money to buy all the talent they need.”
Fortunately, organizations can begin preparing now with small, manageable changes. Even small adaptations made in the short term can help transform an organization from one that is unprepared to meet the demands of the future to one that is making measurable progress in preparing employees to thrive as automation and AI capabilities inevitably disrupt the workplace as we know it.
Eubanks recommends five manageable steps organizations can take in the short term — the next 6 months to a year — to begin keeping pace with the age of automation:
- Identify the risk areas for automation. Certain areas will be obvious: rote processes, tasks that can be done faster and more efficiently by technology. Other areas won’t be as obvious: Experts estimate that jobs such as insurance underwriting, local TV advertising, pharmaceutical discovery and long-haul trucking have the potential to be automated by 2030.12
- Identify what skills the company needs to succeed long term. This requires looking at what the organization needs to continue existing work, as well as expand into new areas of work. What challenges are showing up in the marketplace and what key skills will help overcome those challenges?
- Examine existing employee skills to determine the need for reskilling. Can these employees transition to different areas of the organization, or will they need to be completely reskilled? If they need to be reskilled, do they currently lack hard or soft skills? Can these new skills be learned on the job, or will employees need formal training, and if so, for how long?
- Determine the right training for the right skill. While videos and micro-learning are useful for just-in-time learning, effective reskilling in the age of automation will require far more than a library of courses. “Just because I give you 500 courses doesn’t mean you’re better at your job or that you’re performing better. Learning isn’t the outcome. Better performance is the outcome,” Eubanks says.
- Communicate with everyone. Every employee at every level needs to understand how critical reskilling is to the future of the organization, and by extension, their own futures. Informing everyone on a regular basis about the organization’s plans for the future helps mitigate fear of change and job loss, thus keeping employees motivated and engaged. Just as critically, employees who understand and feel intrinsic to an organization’s long-term goals are more likely to support those goals through their own day-to-day efforts.
Eubanks’ research also discovered that, in the context of reskilling, employees preferred learning via instructor-led training, as well as coaching and mentoring. “Consider an employee whose job is going to change from spending 90 percent of their time writing to about 20 percent. The other 80 percent is now going to be spent on consulting with customers. That’s a different skill set entirely. We can’t tell this employee to go watch a 30-minute course and expect them to be ready.”
These kinds of massive skill overhauls are best served via experiential and social learning experiences, as well as collaborative opportunities. Technology and self- paced courses have a role to play — just not the starring one.
Organizations must act now
For organizations, the age of automation has the potential to drive greater productivity, efficiency and innovation — keys to remaining competitive in a constantly changing economy. Yet capitalizing on these benefits requires organizations to act now. Those that have a “wait and see” approach to change will be left behind, not because change in the era of automation happens overnight, but because it happens every day. “It’s death by a thousand cuts for companies that don’t start to change now,” Eubanks says.
From a strategic perspective, organizations that prioritize learning and reskilling will have a distinct advantage. But in the short term, they can prepare for the new era without a major investment. “Begin making adjustments in the right direction by figuring out the skills you are going to need,” Eubanks says. “Most enterprise organizations already have this kind of information. And then communicate with
everyone about the changes that will be made. It’s really about creating small course corrections now so that your organization is on the right track and employees are more adaptable and engaged.”
Sources
4 Nathan Heller. “Who Really Stands to Win from Universal Basic Income?” The New Yorker. July 2, 2018.
6 New Economic Thinking. “The Future of Work Is Going to Be More Human.” March 20, 2019.
8 “JPMorgan Chase Makes $350 Million Global Investment in the Future of Work.” JPMorgan Chase & Co. March 18, 2019. Accessible at https://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/news/pr/jpmorgan-chase- global-investment-in-the-future-of-work.htm
9 Mike Prokopeak. “Amazon Goes Big With $700 Million Reskilling Pledge.” Chief Learning Officer. July 11, 2019. Accessible at https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2019/07/11/amazon-goes-big-with-700-million- reskilling-pledge/
10 Louise Matsakis. “Amazon Pledges $700 Million to Teach Its Workers to Code.” Wired. July 11, 2019. Accessible at https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-pledges-700-million-training-workers/
11 As reported by Wired in “Amazon Pledges $700 Million to Teach Its Workers to Code” on July 11, 2019
12 Forbes Technology Council. “Tech Experts Predict 13 Jobs That Will Be Automated by 2030.” Forbes. March 1, 2019. Accessible at https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/03/01/tech-experts-predict-13- jobs-that-will-be-automated-by-2030/#31376d3722bf