A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Dec 5, 2013

Training Is Essential in a Technologically Driven Economy: But Most Workers Aren't Gettting It

We take it for granted: walk into a new office with wifi galore, innovative lighting systems, sleep pods, automatic food or drink dispensers, sophisticated work stations. And we take it for granted. Of course all of this is here. It is my due.

What we may fail to consider, however, is who set this all up? Who installed all this stuff and made sure it works? Despite the expense and technological sophistication, we can guess that it probably wasnt someone with an undergraduate degree from Stanford or MIT.

There is hardly a good job in the western economies anymore that is not, at some level, based on an understanding of technology and electronics. Auto mechanics? Construction? Manufacturing? Or how about the military, with tens of thousands of high school graduates using complex devices as a natural part of their daily routine? Most so-called blue-collar work requires an advanced understanding of how this all works and, when necessary, what it takes to be repaired.

The problem is that the people most likely to be asked to assume those tasks are not receiving the training they need because of ideology and accounting conventions. The ideology is that training is someone else's responsibility and expense. The schools, perhaps? Though many are also lobbying to defund them. Or maybe the workers themselves? Despite the fact that stagnant household incomes makes that difficult if not impossible, assuming you want to eat occasionally and sleep under a roof. The accounting convention treats training as an expense rather than an investment, rendering it an obstacle to improving margins and bigger executive bonuses.

The challenge is that competitive economies depend on the people in need of this training if they are going to grow. We know from the work of Erik Brynjolsson and others that training is essential to capturing technology's potential productivity enhancements. Failure to train is simply an early indicator of failure, period. JL

Scott Clement and Jim Tankersley report in the Washington Post:

Lower-income workers -- the ones who most desperately need training to compete for better jobs -- are getting the least amount of training of anyone in the workforce, resulting in a dynamic that makes it harder to catch up.
We wrote about the skyrocketing economic anxieties felt by lower-income American workers --people like John Stewart, who earns $5.25 an hour plus tips (the tips part exempts his employer from strict minimum-wage requirements) pushing wheelchairs at the Philadelphia airport.
Stewart would like to go back to school to receive the training he'd need to become a hospital aide, a job that would very likely pay more than he makes now. But he doesn't have time or money to pursue that training. And in this, he is, sadly, quite the norm.
Take the results of a recent survey by The Washington Post and the University of Virginia's Miller Center, which asked workers whether they had undertaken training to keep skills and knowledge up to date or learn new skills. Among workers with household annual incomes of at least $75,000, two-thirds say they underwent training in the past year. But the training rate dips to 55 percent among middle-income workers ($35,000 to $75,000 a year) and falls further to 41 percent among workers with annual incomes under $35,000.
According to the survey, low-income workers are quite aware they are being held back by lack of training. When they're asked what their biggest obstacle is to getting ahead, "education" tops the list at 29 percent, while 19 percent of middle-income and 11 percent of higher-income workers point to education as a main obstacle. In the survey, nearly nine in 10 lower-income workers lacked a college degree.
Obstacles to training for these workers abound. More than 8 in 10 worry about not having enough money to meet their family's expenses, concerns that naturally exceed those of better-off workers. They also face recent hardships, with a majority saying someone in their household has suffered pay cuts in just the past year and one-third reporting loss of health insurance or other benefits.

0 comments:

Post a Comment