Jottings - Slice of life -299 ( Blue Collared, White collared, and now “New collared” jobs - thoughts on the nature of jobs in the digital age)

Jottings - Slice of life -299 ( Blue Collared, White collared, and now “New collared” jobs - thoughts on the nature of jobs in the digital age)

One of the key questions educators and the industry alike should answer very quickly is what kind of jobs are likely to take over as the twenty-first-century surges along, and Information technology at the workplace in deployed in increasing orders of magnitude. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine learning (ML), Cloud infrastructure, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Internet of things (IoT), are not merely buzz words anymore, meant for geeks and elitist computer professionals. It has already touched the daily lives of the common man in a thousand ways and will continue to transform the way we live and work in the foreseeable future. The key question then is what kind of skills are required for the IT jobs of the future, where most of the repetitive tasks will find BOT’s doing it better and more efficiently, most of the analysis done by algorithms targeted to specific domains, and integrated systems triggered by seamless communication between things, processes, and people. What happens to Human workers and what skills must they possess to manage such resilient, automatic and self-healing technology suffused systems.

The industrial revolution in the nineteenth century bought up similar questions. With large scale mechanical machines taking over, and the mass exodus of people from farms to cities necessitated a massive rethinking of education systems to train and produce skilled workers who can understand how these gigantic machines worked, and how they can be customized to produce different outcomes. Vocational training schools sprung up that took in people with minimal formal education, and trained them on how to use powerful machine tools. The educational discipline of Engineering is also a direct result of this paradigm shift. As is expected with any radical change in the economic arrangement of society, mass agitations erupted over the ascendancy of machines and the death of the human worker; but within decades, the world over, initial anxiety subsided, and in its place, Man accommodated itself to working alongside machines and began to create more and more mechanical appliances without fear of losing jobs or reducing the quality of life. The industrial age became the new normal.

That Computers and Information technology would eventually revolutionize and transform society was a foregone conclusion from the 1940s when the War exposed the tremendous possibilities of processing information, and companies like IBM and Bell were investing heavily into building hardware and software. The question now is: Has the revolution arrived, or yet in the making? That is a difficult question to answer, and in my opinion, can never be answered by a generation in the midst such a transformation. In retrospect, say, hundred years later, social historians may mark our age as one when the “third shift” (in Alvin Toffler's immortal words) happened. But we are in a moving train, and wouldn’t know the difference except for the fact that our daily lives are largely managed through the power technology brings to the table. Whether we like it to not we have to embrace technology, and the workforce of tomorrow will have to know how to work with it.

As an educator, I am inclined to ask myself the question that to find a job in the field of Information technology space in the coming years, would a four-year college degree be a prerequisite any more. Building modern IT applications do not need the kind of low-level expertise it once needed, and which formal education was so good at providing. In the last twenty years, the number of startups, and the background of people behind those startups indicate that it doesn’t take a formal degree in computer science to build software. Mot's of the brilliant software ideas have come from people with liberal art background or college dropouts. This is true today than it was a few decades ago. All we need today is a perception of a human need that can be translated into technological semantics, information on how to assemble ( and not create from scratch) a software product to fulfill that void, and the ability to communicate its value to the world at large, in other words soft-skills. For a more detailed and interesting background on this read Scott Harley’s breezy book “The fuzzy and the Techie”. Scott calls it “democratization of code and platforms”. With necessary vocational skills, passion, and ability to communicate, anyone can build it. The key is to have access to those vocational skills.

I was recently watching an interview by the Ginni Rometty, Chairman and CEO of IBM. A visionary lady leading an IT company of 300,000 plus people. I was intrigued by what she said about modern-day IT jobs, and how IBM is preparing the next generation of IT skilled workers. These jobs are not going to be filled by formal education, but by those who are trained on a particular set of skills that are becoming critical to the modern IT landscape. The era of Blue collared and White-collared jobs are slowly by surely giving way to “New collared” jobs, for want of a better word. Historically, blue collared jobs are manual work, and workers are generally dressed in shades of blue to hide the grime and dust of physical labor. White-collared jobs, on the other hand, indicate those who work out of desks and are formally educated in management, accounting, and engineering. The new collar IT jobs are neither blue or white, but lie at the intersection of the two. Modern IT jobs in cutting edge spaces mentioned in the opening paragraph require a person to know the techniques of getting the software to work, and along with it, they must know enough of the big picture to make the right software choices. And the interesting thing about these New collared jobs is that it doesn’t mandate any formal college degree. The only prerequisite is the openness and willingness to continuously learn. I repeat, the only ingredient to succeed in IT jobs of the future is the ability and commitment to keep moving with technology. Change is the only constant, and the learning minds must be nimble enough to keep pace.

IBM collaborated on an experimental program called P-Tech - Pathways in Technology Early College High School in association with Newyork City department of education. The central theme of P-Tech is to admit students based only on interest and not on grades or testing. It is a six-year program between the grades of 9 and 14. The mission is to nurture and inculcate the love of learning at an even pace. The focus is on STEM - Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths, which forms the backbone of software engineering The cost of the program for the student is zero, and rate of dropout over the last seven years has been less than five percent. Nearly every student who graduated out of P-Tech has begun interning with IBM or affiliated companies, and a significant number have gone on to enroll for higher education. After all, Love of learning is addictive. Ginni Rometty is clear about her reason for supporting P-Tech. Her company needs workers who can fill the new collared jobs AI and other areas opening up, and secondly, it is a corporate social responsibility to bring down the cost of higher education and making it relevant and meaningful for the modern workplace. Its a win-win for all. Currently, P-tech is operative in many countries, with a good pipeline of students. That's the way to build the skill power of the future.

As a discipline, I spend two hours each day researching new software platforms, languages and ideas. Once there is sufficient base, and a holistic appreciation of the various dimensions of Information technology, it is easy to learn new approaches and solutions. To get something to work, or understand the contours of a new software solution is not difficult at all. All that is required to know to learn how to use a tool effectively and the rest will fall into place. That is the role of the “new collar” worker. During my long career teaching and supporting big IT companies, I have met innumerable people who have no idea on how a tool is built, but are extremely good at using that tool to provide answers. Invariably, most of them come from a non-computer science background and possess excellent communication skills. The world of software is not the world of geeks alone anymore. Geeks have their place, but more and more “new-collar” workers with basic knowledge of STEM, passion to learn and looking for decent pay job are gravitating towards IT jobs that sit at the intersection of learning core software products and delivering software solutions.

The new age workers will be free to think of job opportunities creatively and will know how to translate those ideas into popular solutions using cutting-edge technology. That is the quintessential “new collar” worker of the digital age.

God bless…

yours in mortality,

Bala