Eight archetypes illustrate different kinds of work
The time is now for policy-makers and business leaders to prepare Canadian workers for the disruption of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).
That’s according to a report from the Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) and Deloitte Canada that says there’s an urgent need for a national conversation on how jobs will change, and the capabilities needed to respond to that change.
“Right now, there’s not even a conversation happening to sort out actionable solutions to pace the change, so that has to change immediately if we want to have a hope of protecting the future of our workforce,” said Scott Allinson, vice-president of public affairs and research at HRPA in Toronto and co-author of the report.
“We need to agree on the impact of automation and how to protect Canadian workers.”
Background
The future of work will be shaped by the “Intelligence Revolution,” driven not by automation in manufacturing but exponential change based on machine learning, virtually free data storage and communication, and computational power that rivals some human capabilities, according to The Intelligence Revolution: Future-Proofing Canada’s Workforce.
These developments will change what a job means, affecting the work people do and how they do it, said the report, based on nearly 50 interviews with experts, research into the psychology of future capabilities, and a review of academic literature.
“Technology is fundamentally shifting how we work, and we need to think past a job title and to the human capabilities that define what work people do in the future,” said Allinson. “There’ll always be work for people but how it happens will shift, and what we’re trying to do is redefine the human value in the economy.”
It’s an “intelligence explosion,” according to Pete Poovana, researcher at the Laboratory for Alternative Energy Conversion in Vancouver.
“It is a tsunami of disruptive changes due to AI unsettling the workforce. All industries will be affected by AI. It is already displacing jobs, and this displacement will only increase its pace.”
Machines are learning faster than humans and becoming more intelligent as they take on more complicated tasks, said the report. And for the first time, technology is targeting jobs in fields that have so far been immune to the impacts of automation.
“This is the first time that machines in our recorded history… have really strongly come after our ability to make judgments and decisions,” said Stephen Harrington, national lead of talent strategy at Deloitte Canada and co-author of the report.
“That’s the fundamental difference here, and that’s why we end up talking a little too much about job loss and man versus machine. But it’s a false debate, unless you believe we’re going to abandon technology. The conversation needs to be ‘How do we work with machines?’” he said.
“There’s an opportunity now to say, ‘It’s time to let robots be robots, and we can now focus on uniquely human work for people.’”
Surviving the revolution
So, how can workers survive the Intelligence Revolution? The best approach is building “one universal, future-proofed capability” that is portable and transferable, said the report.
Instead of focusing on training, education and technological skills, “Canadians will be better-served to think in terms of sustainable capabilities that are portable and transferable between many occupations, so where AI and robots can’t compete in the foreseeable future,” said Allinson.
“You need to have business also empower the workers to get the skills or the capabilities they need to transfer those capabilities to other jobs when that work comes available, because the work will always be there — it’s the jobs that are going to change.”
Skills are decaying faster, said Harrington, and most have a five-year shelf life.
“That’s a pretty big market change over decades ago when you could count on your technical skills to last a lifetime. So constant education is one thing and we already know that people are going to have to learn and relearn, but the concept of the future-proof worker is the worker that learns that capability that stands over the technical skills.”
The report outlines eight archetypes to illustrate the kinds of work Canadians will perform in the future, and the competencies they will need, such as the protector (who provides the human element machines cannot deliver, such as empathy and judgment), the innovator (an idea-generator who can think creatively) and the influencer (who demonstrates broad leadership capacity).
“Hopefully, people can see themselves in some of these archetypes and begin an individual plan for how they’re going to maintain this thing that’s important to them when they think about work, and build the capabilities that they individually need in order to be successful,” said Harrington.
“Then governments can think about these capabilities when they retrain people, and educators can target higher-order capabilities as part of the way they teach young Canadians, and employers can prepare the workforces that they’re responsible for for the future to protect the investment in their employees.”
Recommendations
The report also recommends modernizing labour laws and the social safety net to reflect the realities of the gig economy, rethinking universal basic income, and re-imagining how schools are organized, from the physical setup to the school year itself.
“The whole mindset of what a higher learning institution is needs to change in the sense that it’s not just (about people) going to get a five-year degree and then going back and updating your skills,” said Allinson.
“Institutions now are lifelong learning centres where people will be moving in and out to enhance their capabilities to make sure they can move into whatever jobs become available at the time, due to the constant change due to technology. It’s rethinking how we look at academic institutions… and trying to meet what’s going to come upon us in the next five, 10, 15 , 20 years.”
There are educators that are already moving in this direction, said Harrington, “but more probably needs to be done to make sure that that overarching capability piece is in place for all of our institutions.”
Finding a robot-proof line of work is becoming impossible, said Poovana. “Inspiring only employees to innovate is not sufficient. The entire education system must be revamped to inculcate the culture of innovation. The broader question should be ‘Can today’s post-secondary students future-proof their careers?’”
Governments and educators need to take a skills-first, not a job-first, approach, said Allinson.
“We need to start framing a jobs policy that isn’t just tied to technology which has a five-year shelf life, and we have to look at what’s the value proposition of humans in this economy, and in this Intelligence Revolution. So government, as a regulator, needs to take this seriously now — it’s not something that can be put off for another five years or another election cycle. Right now, they’re just looking at getting people into short-term jobs, but where’s the long-game vision here?”
Governments have to start getting ahead of this with better labour market data, to know what the jobs will be and the pace of change, he said.
“We don’t want to just survive this, we want Canada as a whole to thrive in this. We’re leaders in providing this technology but we also have to make sure that nobody’s left behind in this, and government as an employer can take a leadership role in this and they just can’t expect to sit on the sidelines and expect business to handle this — they need to adjust as well.”
AI is inevitable, and nobody can stop it, so the big question is how to prepare, said Poovana.
“I don’t see any right policies addressing the concerns. We are already witnessing how quickly the politics over jobs is reshaping the world. But our responses in developing the right strategies are not quick enough.”
He recommended providing universal basic income, identifying new sources of income for Canadians, and being judicious in the way we allow technology to develop, “including an explicit discussion on the ethics of AI.”
It’s an issue that involves government, educators, businesses and individuals, said Harrington.
“We can’t just rely on any one of those stakeholder groups to get to where Canada needs to get to,” he said.
“We need social innovation and we need Canada to lead in social innovation to solve the problem of a new Industrial Revolution, because we know we don’t have all of the ideas necessary yet to be successful, and rather than waiting for another jurisdiction or country to figure it out and solve, why don’t we lead?”
And HR has a key role to play in all this, said Allinson.
“For HR, this is scary but exciting because there is going to be a change on the horizon for the profession on how they’re going to deal with not looking at skills base but looking at competency bases and capabilities bases going forward, and we’re starting to see that… that’s where we see the norm is going to be.”
