We are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution and the impact it will have on work is going to be dramatic.

Transcription

1 We need your help. More people are watching, listening and reading Conversations That Matter. That s great, but producing the show costs money. This is where we need your help. Please become a Conversations That Matter Patron by pledging $1 per show. Click here to set up an account and support us Thank you. We are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution and the impact it will have on work is going to be dramatic. Rather than creating millions of jobs the new economy will displace old technology and jobs, with either automation or professions that require very few humans. How then do you survive? What skills are required to meet the needs of the work place of the future? Will full-time jobs become a thing of the past? Will we all need to be entrepreneurs as we learn to survive in a gig economy? One of the challenges facing Canada is our fractured education agenda. Each province and territory is different and there's no national strategy to buy in to. We're at a critical junction in the digital economy transition where government, educational institutions, and businesses need to work together to understand the future of work and then take action. A made in Canada solution that includes a range of social innovations that may, or may not, include a universal basic income are on the horizon. How we prepare for these coming changes will either protect Canadian jobs or place them at risk. We invited Stephen Harrington, the national lead of Deloitte's Talent Strategy to join us for a conversation

2 that matters about the intelligence revolution and how to future proof Canada's workforce. - [Announcer] Conversations That Matter is a partner program for the Center for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. The production of this program is made possible thanks to the support of the following and viewers like you. - Welcome. When we take a look at the changing nature of work, particularly in Canada, what are some of our opportunities and what are some of the risks? - Well, I'd say the biggest opportunity is for us to think as a country, and that's complicated. - Yes it is, considering we have all these territories. - That's right, so think as a country, think as provinces, educators, employers, individuals, about how we begin to build capability that's gonna last five, 10 years. If we can do that at scale and we can figure out how to build the policies and approaches in Canada first we can begin to describe what the Canadian advantage will be in the next century, that's the opportunity. - Okay, and the risk? - The risk is that we continue to be a little too Canadian about it. If you look at our record of productivity in the last 50 years it's not good. We've done very well as a country being fast followers, in terms of strategy. And we've built an economy that's the envy of the world in many ways, in that period. Unfortunately, fast followers tend not to do as well during periods of economic change, like an industrial revolution. The wind tends to go to the jurisdictions and the companies that are ahead of the curve and begin to make decisions for the global economy about how we're gonna operate in the future, that's where we need to get to. - Well, we're clearly in an intelligence revolution, which is another form of an industrial revolution, are we even poised to be able to capitalize on that in Canada? - Yes, we're tremendously well poised when you think about how educated our population is. So, when we talk about intelligence revolution what we mean is that automation, for the first time in history at scale, is going after our ability to make judgements. So, we're looking at automation of white collar jobs that we previously thought of as safe. But, in our analysis, in our research, we found that there are a number of capabilities that sit above the transactional that will continue to be very marketable in the future. They're things like social awareness, influence, creativity. These are, as I say, these sort of future proof capabilities that actually we're doing a very good job as a country building in post secondary educational. - But those things are not job specific and so are you saying that the nature of a job is changing?

3 - Yes, fundamentally what's happening now is that if the last industrial revolution was all about taking tasks and building them into jobs, - Mhm, bundling them up. - Bundling them up, taking people that we're in an agrarian society and saying, we got a great idea for you, come take this job, we'll pay you every week, that was revolutionary at the beginning of the industrial revolution. - Now, tasks are coming back out of jobs again, they're being automated, they're going to the platform, they're being outsourced. And so that fundamentally is what's changing and it is redefining what we mean by a job, and will continue to. - How then do, other than having good interpersonal skills, being able to analyze, being able to find information and then figuring out what to do with it, how then do I prepare for what the job of the future is gonna be? Because, as this question was coming up I was thinking, when I was a kid people told me, you should become a computer programmer because that's the job of the future, and guess what, they were right. Are we able to do that today? - Yeah, there's a bit of that happening in the market right now, so if somebody is saying to their kids today, you should be a data scientist, well, there's a very good chance in the next 10 years that's very good advice. The problem is, it's not advice you can give to every Canadian. There will not be 35 million data science jobs. So, what we need to do is take a practical look at the jobs that we have today and figure out what they're very likely to be in the next 10 years by doing that task level analysis that I talked to you about. Let's pull these jobs apart and look at what is likely to be automated and what isn't, job by job. And if you're an individual Canadian what you can do is you can look at your job and ask yourself, what is the more strategic thinking that I do, what is the more interpersonal thinking that I do, how do I help others understand how my job fits with other jobs. Those the higher order skills that are most likely to survive in the future. - I'm just gonna get you to hang on for a second while we take a quick commercial break. We'll be right back. - [Announcer] Conversations That Matter is a not-for-profit program made possible thanks to the charitable support of the following and from viewers like you. Please visit ConversationsThatMatter.tv and help us to continue to produce this program. - Are we moving away from an environment where I go work for a company and I can build a career within that company? Am I almost gonna have to be, well, an entrepreneur? Have multiple jobs over the course of my career?

4 - You know, and this gets to something that I think's very important when trying to understand the future, is I think we have more than one scenario before us. There's a lot of things that are going to be decided in the market that are gonna answer the question you just posed. There is a scenario in which there's still a lot of what we consider full time employment and a gig economy, which is sort of where we are today. And there's another scenario where actually the trend growth of contingent work continues and displaces a lot of full time labor. The reason I say there are scenarios is because how will you respond as public, how governments respond and how the private sector respond are gonna have a lot to say. I will say that in the future scenario, no matter what, we talk about something called free agency, meaning that even if you are working for a big company like Deloitte, like I do, or one of the banks or you're in government, increasingly you'll need to respond as a free agent, even within that employment. Because organizations are flattening, people are operating in more of a matrix when it comes to structure. There's still this increased need to be able to represent yourself, your brand as an employee, and what you can contribute, in an increasingly complex workplace, whether you're full time or not. - With the introduction of our ability to work remotely, the work can come to me rather than me go to the work, that takes part of what I had always understood to be a very important component, is interpersonal skills, it starts to take it out of the mix a little bit. Will there not be some kind of push back by people because we are social creatures and work does provide us with social environments. How do we deal with that? - I think isolation is a really important issue that we all need to look at. Whether it's about remote work or actually how some of the technologies we use today isolate us in other psychological ways. The uptick in the use of smart phones, for an example. And this isn't generational, a lot of times when people talk about isolation they point the finger at the younger generations. - Yeah. - But if you've recently been to a retirement home, I've never seen more ipads in my life. This is something that's happening to all of us. So I think we need to look at the isolation issue very seriously and figure out what are the new forms of social interaction that might need to fill the gap that we've counted on private and government institutions to fill in the past. You see some of that experimentation with people opening offices that actually are, housed people who are independent workers. So instead of working from home, there still working remotely but they're going to work with a bunch of strangers. To get exactly what you're-- - So they can go to the coffee machine and have a chat. - Exactly, they can talk about Netflix.

5 - So in your paper that looks at the future of the workplace you have eight different archetypes, lets go through them a little bit. What are they and why is it important that we understand what those archetypes are? - Yeah, and I think it's important to understand why we did that work in the first place. We wanted to build sort of a view of the jobs of the future but we were in the end no better at that than anyone else. I think for a while we had on board some jobs like digital life coach. It sounded really cool but we had no way of proving that that would be a job of the future and then with a lot of the predictions of jobs of the future people are predicting jobs but they tend to be very isolated from the rest of the market. In other words, you can imagine hundreds or thousands of people doing that job, not millions of people doing that job. So, instead what we tried to do was describe what are the capabilities that people are gonna need to have in the future to be successful and we wanted to tie that back to the jobs of today. To make that accessible we did the analysis of taking those jobs of today and putting them into the eight buckets, those archetypes that we describe. One of them, for an example, is called guardian. - The guardian. - The guardian. And this is archetype's all about protecting people. So you can imagine that a policeman or a firefighter would be, or healthcare worker would be-- - Paramedic, so on, yeah. - Absolutely And these people need to have high social awareness as a future proof capability. So that's the ability when you're in an emergency situation to connect with someone else, understand not only what they're saying to you, but also where they're coming from, and putting it into social context. And the other thing they need in spades is judgment. The ability to take a whole bunch of data in very quickly, often in an emergency situation, and make a decision that's going to matter, life and death in a lot of cases. So we know that a lot of those jobs in the guardian archetype will see a lot of automation, they'll see a lot of enhancement, they'll be working more with technology they've never worked with before. But those two capabilities you can see how the archetypes gonna continue to need them into the future. - Well yeah, as a society we need that kind of protection. - Right, and that human interaction will be important to us as citizens. It's very unlikely that in the near future we're gonna be willing to give up those interactions to a completely automated experience. - Right, innovation of course is a big component in all of this as well. As I recall, you got innovator in there as being one of those archetypes. - Yeah. And we don't just mean big I innovation, which is what we tend to think of, we think of Google,

6 right, when we think of innovation, so we think of people who are taking moon shots. But they're actually a lot of innovators in the market today who really, a process engineer for example, is an innovator. They're taking what is right in front of them and they're trying to think about how to make an incremental improvement. And again, over the next 10 years, while there'll be a lot of automation in that space, the creativity, the ability to understand the architecture, the environment that you're operating in, is still gonna be a uniquely human capability. - This is our second break, this is how we keep working. We'll be right back. - [Announcer] Conversations That Matter is a not-for-profit program made possible thanks to the charitable support of the following and from viewers like you. Please visit ConversationsThatMatter.tv and help us to continue to produce this program. - Both protectors and innovators, they have been a part of our development, especially since the industrial revolution, we've needed those components before. So, in a way, what's old is new again in there. What are one of the archetypes that you go, okay, this is a change, this is something that's new? - Well, that's difficult to find 'cause there's a lot of that because what you'll notice is in each of the archetypes what's coming out is what we used to call soft skills, which is a term that I despise, because it's always been underestimated, and when we flip this archetype concept out what we're really saying is, don't think of them as soft, they're actually the hardest. They're the hardest to attain and they're also the hardest to automate. - Okay, because they reach into so many different areas of life. - And they're about complex human interaction, the very thing that is the most difficult to automate. So, if you look at-- - And so that's how I can future proof my job a little bit, by being more human. - That's right. And that's an important point because I think it underlines the opportunity in what's happening to the economy, we have an opportunity, if we're thoughtful about this, to make sure that we let the robots be the robots and let the humans spend more time doing more human forms of work. That's an optimistic view of the future which we think is quite attainable. - So, in virtually every sector though, we're not gonna see complete sectors disappear as far as places of employment for human beings, and only become that for either machine trained devices or robots. It looks like there's gonna be a combination of the two. - Absolutley, yeah, and if you think about another sort of universal capability people will need, it's to be

7 able to to quickly learn how to work alongside automation. Work hand in hand with robots and Ais and learning algorithms to enhance the way we work. That's probably the biggest opportunity that we have as an economy from a productivity perspective. - You know, one of the other things I kinda became fascinated with when I was at this The Future of Work conference that you're here speaking at, there's all this talk about talking about young people but I am starting to realize, hang on a second, there is a transition that's going on for a number of people who are in their 50s and 60s who say, number one, everything that I'm reading about retirement is that it's bad for my health, and number two, I can't afford to retire so I have to keep working as well. So they have to be embracing these same kind of changes, otherwise they're looking at being an in-store greeter or something of that nature. How do you, after a career, say now I have to shift from what I was doing, which was task oriented, and move into these soft skill areas. - I think one of the opportunities is for individuals but also for governments to think about labor market attachment differently. I know that's a technical term but all I mean by that is there's more than one way to add value to an economy. If I were close to retirement, which I hope to be one day, I could add value by going and finding a different job, but I could also add value by going out and solving some of the problem that our economy faces. So, for an example, if I were to volunteer, if I were to take care of people that were later in years and had poor mobility. These are all ways of adding real market value, solving real problems and contributing to the economy that are just starting to break us out of this mold of thinking that the only way to add value is to have a full time job. I think that's sort of the number one piece of advice is for us all to try and be more creative about the ways we engage with the market and with each other. - But it changes the sense of our identity as well though, because so often social interaction is, well what do you do? And if you're not having that full time job or you're not that career, that's another dynamic that changes. - Absolutely. - So, it's like, wow, okay, I'm gonna move into a gig economy where I kinda do this but it's shifting. I do the work, so I have to have skills. I also have to have marketing skills, I have to be able to find that work. And then I need to be able to manage everything because now I'm on my own. How do governments, because when we started off you talked about the fact that we have to look at this as a country, how do governments start to address that and meet my needs? Because, the union's not there to protect me or don't automatically have benefits and health care and so on, so how do we start to change that landscape so that people get the benefit from the richness of our great economy but not be so exhausted that they can't get the work done by the time that it shows up at their doorstep? - Yeah, so quickly I think there's sort of three things that government needs to do and one of them is just

8 have a conversation with the public about the future of work. - But we don't seem to be having that conversation, do we? - I think it's starting to happen, I will certainly say that our clients in government are thinking deeply about this subject, but I'm talking more about a political discourse where Canadians get to take part in a conversation about the future of work is going to be, which is really just saying, we need a new social contract and we need to have that conversation. And that is a democratic conversation, that's not a conversation that should be decided by the private sector or by government themselves. The other thing that government can do is begin to think about the economy of the future. One of the things we have to do is stop thinking about this sort of knock code view, and knock codes are the numbers that are associated with jobs. So stop thinking about a job market the way we traditionally have been and start thinking about a task market. And that will fundamentally change the way governments think about an economy and the way they retrain people, which is a lot more future focused. - Third and final break, we'll be right back. - [Announcer] Conversations That Matter is a not-for-profit program made possible thanks to the charitable support of the following and from viewers like you. Please visit ConversationsThatMatter.tv and help us to continue to produce this program. - It's gonna have a dramatic impact on their ability to collect taxes as well, because if you work for an organization the government's collecting your tax, your employment against your wages at source and now they're not doing that. It's gonna have a big impact on how governments function. - We've already seen that challenge with governments trying to find the revenue stream with platform economies, sometimes with success and sometimes with less. Absolutely, there needs to be policy. But not just revenue collection for what, so what is the social safety net of the future? As you probably know, often times in the future of work discussion, conversations about universal basic income will inevitably creep in, it's because, and that was sort of my last point about what government, this is actually a challenge for everybody, the private sector as well, once we understand the economy differently we have to look at multiple scenarios for how the future might turn out and prepare our organizations and our country for multiple outcomes. This is sort to get unfrozen, right now we're stuck. We wanna know what the one view of the future is before we set policy. - So that requires pretty agile thinking and an ability to move quickly, which is I think the antithesis of most government initiatives, because they're afraid to make mistakes. - Yeah, and part of that is our fault.

9 - Mhm, well we demand it of them. - That's right, so this is a conversation we're starting to have with government and I think it's sort of an education piece we need to do as citizens. If we expect governments to meet the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution then, to your point, they need to be agile, they need to start doing what the private sector's doing and rolling out and experimenting with solutions and sometimes failing. We as citizens have to give governments room to do that if we expect them to respond. - Heaven forbid that we should do that. I don't know that there's much of an appetite for it. So, to wrap up, we are in the midst of this already, this is not something that is the future, it's already happening because we see machine based learning accelerating at an incredible rate. Artificial intelligence isn't that far away. Is the Singularity around the corner? So, here we are, we're in something that I think we all have to pay very close attention to if we wanna be able to survive, not only as a country, but individually. - Yeah, you bring up a very important point, our analysis, as you know, Deloitte's is an analytical firm, is very much grounded in the technologies that we're seeing on the ground today. All we're doing to create the predictions that we have is casting that today scenario forward a few years. It means that technologies that are already hitting the market, like robotic process automation, we just look at how that's very likely to unfold over the next 10 years. - That is the challenge of the future. Thank you very much for doing this, - Thank you. - Appreciate it, thank you.

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