The Future of Workforce

Today standing in the beginning of 2020, people more than ever commonly agree that by 2030, many jobs will vanish due to automation. A study by Brookings shows that about 25% of US jobs (i.e. equivalent to 36 million jobs in 2016 estimates) will face high exposure to automation in the next decades. The group of workers who are vastly affected by automation are underrepresented communities, which especially consists of the young labors. Now we need education reform more than ever!

The bulk of the workforce by the end of 2020s consists of the current population of high school students. It is the time now to prepare our students for the future of work, especially the underprivileged/underrepresented students who do not even have access to extracurricular and after-school programs. We need to come up with alternative paths to empower this group of students to become part of the skilled workforce even without a college degree. Before digging into the ideas for alternative paths, we should ask ourselves what the required skills will be in future.

Having a list in mind, I asked my brilliant first year undergraduate students to imagine themselves in their future selves and think about skills they need to have been mastered in. The results were impressive. My students not only thought about the most important analytical skills and creativity, but also emphasized on communication skills, project management, and teamwork. In my opinion, sometime soft skills and the skills related to emotional intelligence are a lot harder to be replaced by artificial intelligence or robots and at the same time far harder to learn. These can be considered extremely important in the future of the workspace. Both soft skills and information-technology skills are required for a successful future. We need to teach them and instill them well at young ages.

We have been recently developing an idea to empower the current high school students to gain these skills in a fun, real, and productive way. Training through real work has long been proved to be effective and more fun for employees at different levels. Everyone learns better if they work on a real world problem than a hypothetical example, because one feels and experiences the implications and understand the effects in realtime.

We plan to provide free programs for high school students to help them develop digital age skills and prepare them to work in tech companies. Digital/tech skills will be instilled step-by-step through working on real world problems under mentorship of industrial/academic professionals. We plan to partner with companies to design projects.

I would be thrilled to continue developing this idea with bright experienced entrepreneurs, mentors, and experts. If you are interested to know more, or join our team and collaborate with us, please get in touch! Feel free to reach me on LinkedIn or my webpage.