From Project Syndicate, July 4:
To succeed in today’s fast-changing labor market,
workers are expected to be agile lifelong learners, comfortable with
continuous adaptation, and willing to move across industries. But
addressing skills obsolescence requires overcoming high psychological
and intellectual barriers.
MILAN
– As new technologies continue to upend industries and take over tasks
once performed by humans, workers worldwide fear for their futures. But
what will really prevent humans from competing effectively in the labor
market is not the robots themselves, but rather our own minds, with all
their psychological biases and cognitive limitations.
In today’s
fast-changing labor market, the most in-demand occupations– such as data
scientists, app developers, or cloud computing specialists – did not
even exist five or ten years ago. It is estimated that 65% of children entering primary school today will end up in jobs that do not yet exist.
Succeeding in such a labor market requires workers to be agile
lifelong learners,
comfortable with continuous adaptation and willing to move across
industries. If one profession becomes obsolete – a change that can
happen virtually overnight – workers need to be able to shift nimbly
into another.
Lifelong learning is
supposed to provide the intellectual flexibility and professional
adaptability needed to seize opportunities in new and dynamic sectors as
they emerge, as well as the resilience to handle shocks in declining
industries. Training centers, the logic goes, simply need to identify
the competencies that companies will look for in the future and design
courses accordingly.
Yet, in the
eurozone,
only about 10% of the labor force undertook some type of formal or
informal training in 2017, and the share declined sharply with age. If
lifelong learning is the key to competing in the labor market, why are
people so reluctant to pursue it?
The truth is that
reversing the process of skills obsolescence requires overcoming
psychological and intellectual barriers that are too often ignored.
According to behavioral economics, human beings are biased toward the status quo: we overestimate the potential losses of a deviation from our baseline, and underestimate the potential benefits.
Lifelong learning is
viewed as extremely costly in terms of time, money, and effort, and the
returns are regarded as highly uncertain, especially amid technological
disruption. Such views may be reinforced by the feelings of depression
and hopelessness that often arise when workers lose their jobs or face
career crossroads.
If the need to “start
over” after years in a certain job or field is demoralizing, after
decades it can seem like an insurmountable challenge. And, in fact,
embarking on such a change late in life runs against our natural
patterns of development.
Human beings experience a decline in
cognitive
performance relatively early in life, with fluid intellectual abilities
– associated with working memory, abstract reasoning, and the
processing of novel knowledge – beginning to decline around age 20.
After middle age, these abilities deteriorate substantially, making the
acquisition of new skills increasingly challenging. Only our crystalized
cognitive abilities, related to communication and management skills,
improve later in life.
This reflects
centuries of evolution. In almost any society, age is associated with
wisdom, experience, and growing social status. Youth was the time for
learning the fundamentals of the profession that one would practice
throughout adulthood. Once in that job, a worker would refine their
skills as they gained experience, but they would probably not have to
learn new competencies from scratch.
Today’s training
programs are ineffective partly because they usually target fluid
intellectual abilities.
For companies, the conclusion seems to be that
retraining a workforce is too challenging, so when new skills are
needed, it is better to pursue alternatives like automation, offshoring,
and crowdsourcing. In its 2015 Economic Report of the President,
the US Council of Economic Advisers found that the share of US workers
receiving either paid-for or on-the-job training fell steadily from 1996
to 2008....MORE
