After the Pandemic, a Revolution in Education and Work
Awaits
Providing
more Americans with portable health care, portable pensions and opportunities
for lifelong learning is what politics needs to be about post-Nov. 3.
Opinion
Columnist
- Oct. 20, 2020
The good Lord works in mysterious ways.
He (She?) threw a pandemic at us at the exact same time as a tectonic shift in
the way we will learn, work and employ. Fasten your seatbelt. When we emerge
from this corona crisis, we’re going to be greeted with one of the most
profound eras of Schumpeterian creative destruction ever — which this
pandemic is both accelerating and disguising.
No job, no K-12 school, no university,
no factory, no office will be spared. And it will touch both white-collar and
blue-collar workers, which is why this election matters so much. How we provide
more Americans with portable health care, portable pensions and opportunities
for lifelong learning to get the most out of this moment and cushion the worst
is what politics needs to be about after Nov. 3 — or we’re really headed for
instability.
The reason the post-pandemic era will
be so destructive and creative is that never have more people had access to so
many cheap tools of innovation, never have more people had access to
high-powered, inexpensive computing, never have more people had access to such
cheap credit — virtually free money — to invent new products and services, all
as so many big health, social, environmental and economic problems need
solving.
Put all of that together and KABOOM!
You’re going to see
some amazing stuff emerge, some long-established institutions, like
universities, disappear — and the nature of work, workplaces and the workforce
be transformed.
I’ve been discussing
this moment with Ravi Kumar, the president of the Indian tech services company
Infosys, whose headquarters is in Bangalore. Because Infosys helps companies
prepare for a digital world, I’ve always found it a source of great insight on
global employment/education trends. I started my book “The World Is Flat” there
in 2004. Back then, Infosys’ main business was doing work that American
companies would outsource to India. Today, Kumar operates from New York City,
where he’s creating thousands of jobs in America. How could that be?
It starts with the fact, explained
Kumar, that the Industrial Revolution produced a world in which there were
sharp distinctions between employers and employees, between educators and
employers and between governments and employers and educators, “but now you’re
going to see a blurring of all these lines.”
Because the pace of technological
change, digitization and globalization just keeps accelerating, two things are
happening at once: the world is being knit together more tightly than ever —
sure, the globalization of goods and people has been slowed by the pandemic and
politics, but the globalization of services has soared — and “the half-life of
skills is steadily shrinking,” said Kumar, meaning that whatever skill you
possess today is being made obsolete faster and faster.
Your children can
expect to change jobs and professions multiple times in their
lifetimes, which means their career path will no longer follow a simple
“learn-to-work’’ trajectory, as Heather E. McGowan,
co-author of “The Adaptation Advantage,” likes to say, but rather a path of
“work-learn-work-learn-work-learn.”
“Learning is the new pension,” Ms.
McGowan said. “It’s how you create your future value every day.”
The most critical role for K-12
educators, therefore, will be to equip young people with the curiosity and
passion to be lifelong learners who feel ownership over their education.
Obviously, everyone still needs strong
fundamentals in reading and writing and math, but in a world where you will
change jobs and professions several times, the self-motivation to be a lifelong
learner will be paramount.
Parallel to that, explained Kumar,
accelerations in digitization and globalization are steadily making more work
“modular,’’ broken up into small packets that are farmed out by companies.
Companies, he argues, will increasingly become platforms that synthesize and
orchestrate these modular packets to make products and services.
In the process, Kumar added, “work will
increasingly get disconnected from companies, and jobs and work will
increasingly get disconnected from each other.’’ Some work will be done by
machines; some will require your physical proximity in an office or a factory;
some will be done remotely; and some will be just a piece of a task that can
also be farmed out to anyone, anywhere.
As more work becomes modular, digitized
and disconnected from an office or factory, many more diverse groups of people
— those living in rural areas, minorities, stay-at-home moms and dads and those
with disabilities — will be able to compete for it from their homes.
The reason Kumar now operates from New
York is that he sees a huge new market in helping U.S. companies to prepare for
this world by identifying potential new employees with skills — whether or not
they have college degrees — then pairing them with new pathways of online
training and pairing companies with these new talent pools. Every big company
is going through this now — or will. Even The New York Times!
Look at the list of
online opinion writers for The Times: It’s radically different from when I
became a columnist in 1995, when you had to be a staff employee. Today we have
full-time staff columnists; columnists who are not on the staff but contribute
regularly from all over the world, and on many days, one-time contributors. The
people who moderate the comments on our columns are workers who plug in from
all over the world, and much of the art is provided by freelancers. My longtime
copy editor is working from home.
Welcome to the Times orchestra.
This is already having a big impact on
education. “We have started hiring many people with no degrees,’’ explained
Kumar. “If you know stuff and can demonstrate that you know stuff and have been
upskilling yourself with online training to do the task that we need, you’re
hired. We think this structural shift — from degrees to skills — could bridge the
digital divide as the cost of undergraduate education has increased by 150
percent over the last 20 years.’’
Infosys still hires lots of engineers.
But today Kumar is not looking just for “problem solvers,’’ he says, but
“problem-finders,’’ people with diverse interests — art, literature, science,
anthropology — who can identify things that people want before people even know
they want them.
Steve Jobs was the ultimate
problem-finder.
Now so many more people can play at
that, because you no longer need to know how to code to generate new software
programs. Thanks to artificial intelligence, there is now “no-code software.’’
You just instruct the software to design some code for the application that
you’ve imagined or need and, presto, it will spit it out.
“We’re seeing the democratization of software
— the consumers can now be the creators,’’ Kumar explained. It shows you how AI
will take away jobs of the past, while it creates jobs of the future.
Finally, he argues, in the future,
postsecondary education will be a hybrid ecosystem of company platforms,
colleges and local schools, whose goal will be to create the opportunity for
lifelong “radical reskilling.”
“Radical reskilling means I can take a
front-desk hotel clerk and turn him into a cybersecurity technician. I can take
an airline counter agent and turn her into a data consultant.”
Today, companies like
Infosys, IBM or AT&T are all creating cutting-edge in-house universities —
Infosys is building a 100-acre campus in Indianapolis designed to provide their
employees and customers not “just-in-case learning’’ — material you might or
might not need to master the job at hand — but “just-in-time learning,’’
offering the precise skills needed for the latest task, explained Kumar.
In the future, lifelong learning will
be done by what I call “complex adaptive coalitions.’’ An Infosys, Microsoft or
IBM will partner with different universities and even high schools, argues
Kumar. The universities’ students will be able to take just-in-time learning
courses — or do internships — at the corporations’ in-house universities, and
company employees will be able to take just-in-case humanities courses at the
outside universities. Both will be able to “learn, earn and work,’’ all at the
same time. It’s already beginning.
There is great potential here — if it is done right. The students
get exposed to what is most new by way of innovation technologies and
techniques. And the company engineers and executives get exposed to what is
most enduring — civics, ethics, theories of justice, principles of democracy,
notions of the public good, environmentalism and how to lead a life of purpose.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs
Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer
Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,”
which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
