Soft or Work Skills for Employment and Society

Soft skills for work and employment to complement technical skills have been recently highlighted, again, by a Deloitte Australia media release, following is a summary.

Soft Skills for Work (Image copyright Pexels)

‘While the future of work is human, Australia faces a major skills crisis - The right response can deliver a $36 billion economic bonus

12 June 2019: With skills increasingly becoming the job currency of the future, a new Deloitte report finds that the future of work has a very human face. Yet Australia is challenged by a worsening skills shortage that requires an urgent response from business leaders and policy makers.

The path to prosperity: Why the future of work is human, the latest report in the firm’s Building the Lucky Country series:

• Dispels some commonly held myths around the future of work
• Uncovers some big shifts in the skills that will be needed by the jobs of the future
• Reveals that many key skills are already in shortage – and the national skills deficit is set to grow to 29 million by 2030
• Recommends that businesses embrace, and invest in, on-the-job learning and skills enhancement
• Finds that getting Australia’s approach to the future of work right could deliver a $36 billion national prosperity dividend.

Employment Myths busted

The report dispels three myths that tend to dominate discussions around the future of work.

1. Myth 1: Robots will take the jobs. Technology-driven change is accelerating around the world, yet unemployment is close to record lows, including in Australia (where it’s around the lowest since 2011).
2. Myth 2: People will have lots of jobs over their careers. Despite horror headlines, work is becoming more secure, not less, and Australians are staying in their jobs longer than ever.
3. Myth 3: People will work anywhere but the office. The office isn’t going away any time soon, and city CBDs will remain a focal point for workers.

The big skills shift ahead: from hands…to heads…to hearts

“That today’s jobs are increasingly likely to require cognitive skills of the head rather than the manual skills of the hands won’t be a surprise,” Rumbens said. “But there’s another factor at play. Employment has been growing fastest among less routine jobs, because these are the ones that are hardest to automate.”

More than 80% of the jobs created between now and 2030 will be for knowledge workers, and two-thirds of jobs will be strongly reliant on soft skills.

Critical skills and the multi-million gap

As work shifts to skills of the heart, Rumbens said the research reveals that Australia already faces skills shortages across a range of key areas critical to the future of work.

“These new trends are happening so fast they’re catching workers, businesses and governments by surprise,” Rumbens said.

At the start of this decade, the typical worker lacked 1.2 of the critical skills needed by employers seeking to fill a given position. Today, the average worker is missing nearly two of the 18 critical skills advertised for a job, equating to 23 million skills shortages across the economy.

The business response?

Rumbens said that getting ahead of the game will require concerted action.

The report includes a series of checkpoints business leaders and policy makers, can use to inform, and drive action. These include:

• Identify the human value – Identify which jobs can be automated, outsourced to technology such as AI, and which are uniquely human. Use technology to improve efficiency, and increase the bounds of what’s possible.
• Forecast future skills needs – Understand the skills, knowledge, abilities and personal characteristics of your employees.
• Re-train, re-skill, and re-deploy – People represent competitive advantage. Consider alternatives to redundancy such as re-training, re-skilling or re-deploying as options to support existing workers reach for new opportunities.
• Involve people – The people who do the work are often the best placed to identify the skills they require to succeed. Find ways to involve employees in the design and implementation of learning programs.
• Talk about technology honestly – Engage in an honest dialogue about the impacts of technology to support staff and generate new ideas for managing change.
• Manage the robots – Introduce digital governance roles to evaluate the ethics of AI and machine learning, alongside existing frameworks.
• Use mentoring and apprenticeships – Micro-credentialing holds the key to unlocking the value of emerging job skills, while apprenticeship models are re-emerging as an effective way for business to develop a future-ready workforce.
• Recruit and develop social and creative skills – Recognise and reward social skills such as empathy, judgement, and collaboration when recruiting and developing workers.

For more articles and blogs about soft skills and adult learning click through.

Ageing Population Budget Costs

Elections, budgets and governance in most western and now developing nations that are democracies are being impacted by increasing numbers of retirees and pensioners in the upper median age demographic, being catered to by politicians, especially conservatives.

Older Households Drawing upon Budget (Image copyright Grattan Institute)

From the Australian Broadcasting Commission:

'The costs of an ageing population keep growing, but who's going to pay?

By chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici

Updated 27 May 2019, 9:29am

‘…..The politics may be tricky but future governments will have to confront the grim economic reality of the post-World War II baby boom.

Australians born after 1946 began to retire in huge numbers in 2011. Demand for the aged pension, aged care and health services have been rising commensurately.

The working age population is a net contributor to the federal budget. Older people, on the other hand, are the largest recipients of welfare, aged care and health care services.

Retirees are getting expensive

A report released last month by the independent, non-partisan Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) warns the ageing population will exert "historically unique" pressure on the federal finances in the decade to 2028-29.

New figures in the report show that by 2028, Australians born between 1946 and 1964 will cost the Government more than Medicare does each year. Based on 2018 budget forecasts, the PBO estimates the cost of Medicare to be $32 billion in 2028-29. By then, lost revenue ($20 billion) and increased spending ($16 billion) on baby boomers will amount to $36 billion.

The number of working-age Australians for every person aged 65 and over has fallen from 7.4 in the mid-1970s, to 4.4 in 2015. That figure is projected to fall to just 3.2 in 2055.

Economists and policy makers need to find new taxpayers and increase workforce participation to support the hordes of older people entering retirement.

The ageing population means that by 2028-29, the PBO estimates there will be 600,000 fewer workers.

While the Australian population has been ageing, life expectancy has also improved.
As far as the government's fiscal fortunes go, it's a perfect storm. The pension was introduced in 1909 with 65 set as the qualifying age for men.'

While mostly conservative parties attract most of the upper median age vote they are or have been compromised by financial policies catering to the same, but impairing budgets into the long term.  Who's going to pay? Younger generations.....

For more articles or blogs about ageing democracy and demography, click through.