Thomas Friedman has an interesting Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times in which he argues that our current recession, while torched by the financial crisis continues to burn because of our educational crisis:
"Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline
of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the
middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive
with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This
loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production
of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much
closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained
their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their
real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and
asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many
American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job
and lacking the skills to compete globally.”
Friedman goes on to point out that in a global economy, "average" workers won't be able to make it:
Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again
hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to
make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs,
energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old
customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.
Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating
from high school and college — more education — but we need more of
them with the right education.
As
the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you
think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market,
those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can
compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with
new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the
top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and
not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing
technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done
poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make
them easily substitutable.”
Argues Friedman, workers who have the skills and education to make their occupations less routine and more valuable are the ones who will succeed in a shifting economy.
Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line
worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of
“A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average
work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster,
cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all
about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on
top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving
reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and
creativity.
Given these changes, how is your WIB and One Stop supporting this shift? What are you doing as a staff person to obtain the professional development and skills that will keep you marketable in a transformed economy?
