One of the important tasks before every WIB and One-Stop is understanding the changing nature of work and its implications for the workforce. How are jobs being transformed and what do we do to prepare job seekers and respond to business needs?
Two articles today provide dueling visions of the future of work.
First up is this article in USA Today on the rise of jobs demanding multiple skills in the post-recession economy:
Many businesses across post-recession America are asking employees to assume multiple roles, transforming the nature of work. Call-center representatives who used to just answer questions or complaints are now trained to sell products or investigate problems. Many human resources managers are doing more than providing benefits information and running company picnics — they're often revamping entire departments, saving firms the cost of hiring consultants. And engineers often must have the financial acumen to figure the profit margins of their jobs and pick materials accordingly, saysDavid Smith, a managing director for Accenture.
While GM began cross-training and rotating workers at its White Marsh plant when it opened 10 years ago, other GM factories have adopted the system in recent years, says GM spokeswoman Kim Carpenter.
The shift is one reason many employers say they can't find skilled workers despite 9.1% unemployment. Forty percent of firms planning to hire have had job openings at least six months, according to a survey released last month by McKinsey Global Institute.
"Employers are being very selective about hiring, and they want to hire people who are good at a lot of things," says Jonas Prising, Americas president for top staffing firm ManpowerGroup.
That makes the job hunt even tougher for the 45% of the unemployed who've been out of work six months or longer. Many of those 6.2 million Americans lack the skills needed for today's multifaceted jobs, such as a mastery of Excel spreadsheets and financial software or a familiarity with computer-controlled factory machines.
If this "jack of all trades" approach is the future of work, that means job seekers need to broaden their skill sets and be very fast learners.
At the same time, we have this Harvard Business Review Article on the rise of "hyperspecialization":
The term “hyperspecialization” is not synonymous with outsourcing work to other companies or distributing it to other places (as in offshoring), although it is facilitated by the same technologies. Rather, it means breaking work previously done by one person into more-specialized pieces done by several people. Whether or not those pieces are outsourced or distributed, their separation often leads to improvements in quality, speed, and cost.
To understand the magnitude of the quality gains that hyperspecialization makes possible, consider how much time you personally spend on tasks that don’t draw on your expertise and that you may not even be particularly adept at performing. Just like craft workers of the past, knowledge workers engage in myriad peripheral activities that could be done better or more cheaply by others (particularly others who specialize in them). Project managers, for example, spend untold hours preparing slide decks even though few of them have the software facility and design sensibilities to do that well. Some are able to delegate the task, which at least allows it to be accomplished less expensively. But imagine a service like TopCoder that could offer instant access to a network of PowerPoint jockeys. Imagine further that some of those remote workers were brilliant chart producers, others were eagle-eyed proofreaders, and still others were content experts for different types of presentations. (Some, for instance, might specialize in sales presentations for office supply products, and others in internal project review meetings for the pharmaceutical industry.) Add an inspired graphic designer, and there’s little doubt that the presentation would be enhanced.
Hyperspecialization suggests a work world vastly different from the one described in the first article. This is a land of free agents with highly specialized knowledge, working remotely on very specific problems. Workers in this world will need very different skills than those in the "multi-tasking" world.
The question, of course, is which of these visions will win out? Or will it be both, with some workers expected to manage a broad variety of value-add tasks, while others work on hyper-specialized activities that support these broader jobs? And what are the implications for workforce development?
