How governments are rising to the Future of Work challenge, or not

Not a leader board, but a mixed bag of policies

[Published on 12/03, revised on 16/03]

With its recent budget publication, the UK government announced a £2.5bn “Skills Fund”:

“The government wants to facilitate two culture changes with this fund: for individuals to be able to train and retrain over the course of their lifetimes; and for employers and the government to increase investment and fill the skills gaps that hold back productivity at a local, regional and national level”.

As we review the budget and what it means for us, here’s what both the UK and other governments are doing to ready us the Future of Work. The focus on lifelong learning is overwhelming. But:

• Are governments paying attention to what and how we should be empowered to learn in order to thrive in the Future of Work?
• What role are they forecasting for human intelligence in the future of their economies and societies?
• How are they planning to engage human workforce in a healthy, productive and meaningful way?

Yesterday’s budget reveals a strong focus by the UK Government on life-long learning for the Future of Work:

“Supporting people to improve their skills is a vital part of the government’s aim to level up opportunity across the country. Increasing productivity depends on improving the skills levels of this generation and the next. Adult skills provision must improve to meet the needs of people and business now and in the future.”

Here are some important highlights from the Budget:

• R&D investment will grow to 0.8% of GDP to meet “great challenges facing society”, such as pandemics like the Coronavirus, which will increase (Gates Foundation)
• Investment in education — and teachers, remains a priority: funding will increase by 4% compared to 2019‑20 budgets, including raising teachers’ starting salaries
• The Government is launching a £2.5 billion National Skills Fund to improve the technical skills of adults across the country and “focused on helping people [to] gain the skills they need for rewarding, well-paid jobs”
• Every year £90 million will be invested in the Arts to provide high quality arts programmes, engaging and creative lessons and extracurricular activities
• Up to eight new Institutes of Technology will be opened, focussed on higher level technical skills gaps in local areas and an additional £1.5 billion invested more tech facilities of college estate
• Commitment to the 2017 Apprenticeship Levy will be renewed, whilst ensuring it meets long-term skills needs
• Self-employed parents will receive Parental Pay and Leave.

(The National Skills Fund is part of a more hazy “Right to Retrain” from Boris Johnson’s manifesto that was aimed at life-long learning. Similarly, the ILO’s Global commission on the Future of Work endorsed “a universal entitlement to lifelong learning that enables people to acquire skills and to re-skill and up-skill”.)

Although the financial commitments to skills development made yesterday by the UK government cannot be overlooked, we must put this work into context: skills development for Future Work readiness is not a new topic in Whitehall. Instead, the question as to what skills we must invest in, beyond the more obvious technical skills, remains unanswered.

1. In 2016, the UK government commissioned the “Foresight Future of Skills and Lifelong Learning project” that concluded we must support lifelong learning beyond digital up-skilling (Lifelong digital skills development, current picture and future challenges) and that:

“The digital development in the area of education must not lead to responsibility for public education being placed on the digital industry.”

2. In 2017, both the Industrial Strategy green paper and the Digital Strategy focussed on the need to address gaps in “basic” and STEM skills, university attainment rates and — frighteningly generic, the “skill levels in lagging areas”. This was supposed to deliver to the UK “great” public services and “the conditions for competitive, world-leading businesses”. However, at a time when the digital sectors are likely to create jobs 2.8 times faster than the rest of the economy (Tech City UK), it is imperative to ask ourselves what skills these jobs would entail.

Both strategies miss the opportunity to identify and address flexible career alternatives. In my next post, I review a working solution for finding alternatives to the factory model of school > university > a job-for-life

3. Whilst the same year, Tom Watson MP’s Future of Work Commission argued (The future of work in Britain) that:

• Human creativity will be at the heart of the future work and a fulfilling work life — and in school, creative subjects must feature as core curriculum competences
• A new objective in the national curriculum “preparedness for work” must be drafted (by an eccentric mix of business leaders, economists, psychologists and educational experts)
• A more ambitious, universal Future Work life-long learning account will make the principle of life-long learning a reality
• AI technologies must deliver individualised learning programmes and new types of formative assessment
• Peer to peer learning must be initiated in new regional, national and international communities outside of school walls
• We need to move towards place-based innovation
• Crucially, the need for computer science and data literacies must support informed and active citizenship in a society increasingly dependent on data use and algorithms.

“Creative, non-cognitive, social and critical thinking will drive the creative use of technology and therefore growth, and the creation of good jobs.”

Under its 2017 presidency of the G20, Germany brought the topic of “Future of Work” at the top of the Summit’s agenda. Germany focussed on:

1. The use of digital technologies for Good Work
2. Protecting participation in the labor market and preparing workers as much as the welfare state and firms for the future economy
3. Addressing the need for interdisciplinary, participative research
4. Calling for new definitions of employee, employer and company conditions.

In reality, Germany had been carrying out consultations on the Future of Work since 2015, involving academia, unions, and the nonprofit and private sectors. The consultation culminated in the white paper Work 4.0, which places lifelong learning at the top and makes early, innovative recommendations in this respect:

How can workers be supported effectively in this rapidly changing environment? Placing life-long learning at the top of the policy agenda.

• Lifelong learning is essential in order to keep up with rapidly evolving technological developments
• The solution includes a legal right to continuing vocational education and training
• A “personal activity account” would be accorded to citizens at the beginning of their working life. The funds in the account could be used for improving skills, starting a business or taking personal leave during their careers.

Other recommendations included: more flexible working arrangements and employee autonomy (with a warning about the blurred work/life boundaries); health and safety of digital work; social protection of the self-employed and employee-like self-employed workers.

One year later, in May 2016 the US Government announced the Future of AI Initiative. This is different from President Trump’s most recent American AI Initiative, in that the 2016 work focussed not only on the opportunities but also the challenges of AI-driven automation for human development. The study defined as one of the four key policy responses “to educate and train Americans for jobs of the future” (Artificial Intelligence, Automation and the Economy).

A focus on lifelong learning is inevitable in the context of the Future of Work. US’ current administration is funding a research initiative on human-technology frontier in the future of work. However, a crucial question remains as to who is fit to decide what we should retrain to and when.

• In the US, employer-based training spend contributes a critical $528 billion of the country’s total $1.6tn human development budget (A. Carnevale; A. Hanson, Learn and Earn). I doubt that in the absence of a clear long-term vision about the Future of Work, we should leave the important job of workforce development to corporates’ decision-making alone?
• According to Brookings’ Government research fellow Jacobs:

high-intensity programs focused on developing skills and competencies are the most cost-effective workforce development training and not short-term, job placement-specific programs

• A recent application of this is LRNG’s career pathway initiative in 13 regions of the US: a place-based education and training approach incorporating sophisticated life-wide skills development and assessment inspired also by online gaming. I will review this and more is my next chapter of this series. (Sadly, a place-based approach to life-long learning that ensures skills training is relevant to specific labor market demand and is inclusive of academic, private and community interests is an approach which has been around academia, unpracticed, for far too long: see LLAKES 2012)
• Flipping the problem on its head, Brandman University, a private non profit postsecondary institution focused on working adults, has utilised the Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network to map occupational competencies directly onto its curricula.

Crucially, out of all the examples mentioned here, the US is the only government not committing to a specific training & learning budget for its citizens in the face of labour market uncertainties. The clear need to learn new competencies and skills throughout life, within and outside the classroom cannot be sacrificed to corporate’s profit-chasing behaviour alone

The demise of vocational education in the 1970s was due to its lack of rigour, which effectively shut out students from pursuing further education (Jacobs, 2013).

Back to competency based education?

Do these findings point to the need to go back to competency-based education, then? Competency-based education uses standardised tests and portfolios of work to understand the skills individuals have acquired outside of formal education programs. It is nothing new by the way: the American Council for Education has been using it for years to provide veterans with credit for what they learned in the military.

Instead, the more lucrative industry-based certifications — based strictly on assessments of actual competency — have risen to prominence over the past decade. Partly to blame is our 20th century lecture hall education model, which only accredits course work presented in class, discouraging individuals from learning outside the classroom (aka life-wide learning).

Competency-based and life-wide learning present important lessons for our our 20th century lecture hall education model. All signals point to a kaleidoscopic vision of the future of learning (and work): we live at a time when new technologies like sophisticated assessment software have encouraged chunk-based learning, where students command their own learning pace and educators do not lecture pupils but facilitate their learning. In following posts, I will be looking at what institutions and technologies are powering this idea of a “free” learner.

Conclusions

Technology has displaced important sections of the workforce and, in some cases, market rigidities have played a role. Recent IMF research suggests that technological progress beats globalisation as the main explanation for why workers have failed to benefit from the limited economic growth since the financial crisis. In the UK alone, real wages have fallen faster than productivity.

As we face the possibility of a further economic slow-down in the aftermath of the current pandemic, we must endorse the opportunity that innovation in education will bring to more sustainable, productive and fulfilled human systems. Investing in the life-long training and life-wide learning of every citizen must be accompanied by more rigorous and visionary horizon scanning of the skills and the jobs that will ensure us this future. (And some introspective analysis has to be done to understand where and why Individual Learning Accounts have failed in the past.)

This can only be achieved by convening all society stakeholders together (not just the big, biased tech firms, please!) and starting with small scale experiments, alongside the academic papers, government green papers… and the blogs like this one!

In this report The Economist concludes:

developing the business models which make the best use of new technologies will involve trial and error and human flexibility.

In the second part of this post I will present a data-driven study which shows exactly what this might look like.

To date, very few government initiatives address this issue with the breadth of inspiration and depth of thinking required to flexibly revisit the concepts of work and skills that technology keeps redefining. And yet we forget that we have seen this before: in the past the industrial revolution freed, or forced, workers into jobs which required more cognitive dexterity.

Today, the leaps in machine intelligence could create space for people to specialise in different occupations as yet unsuited to machines: a world of artists and therapists, love counsellors and yoga instructors…