For quite a while now I’ve been a member of our local school district’s Industry Advisory Board and, as a result, have had a direct interest in how we provide our young people with the skills they’ll need when they join the workforce. To give you an idea of how far back this involvement goes, one of the first efforts in which I took part concerned convincing the school board to include computer keyboarding as a basic skill required for all high school students.
Today, of course, most kids know their way around a QWERTY keyboard or cell phone keypad before they reach middle school. For its time, however—when the PC was young and the Internet was still waiting to be invented by Al Gore—the idea was a pretty radical one. After all, common wisdom said, how many teenagers were really likely to be using computers in their future careers anyway?
Technology, we all know by now, can dramatically change the ways in which we communicate and do business…and that those changes can come at us with startling speed. A decade or so from now, the first generation to never have experienced life without web access or email will reach maturity, and I have to wonder what shape the career skills of the future are going to take. Keep in mind that these were the children who years ago rushed to embrace MySpace and Facebook as necessary elements of a full social life while the rest of us wrote them off as trivialities.
Now, I’m not speaking of the multitasking “Millennials” who are presently entering the workforce. That “generation” grew up with “tech” and is adept at using it to manipulate the world around them. The members of the next cohort, today’s elementary and middle school kids, will probably possess a somewhat different perspective. They have experienced technology as an environment—not just a set of tools. They have learned to build and enjoy relationships based on common interests rather than shared geography. They spend less time with traditional media and invest more time in the decentralized, viral world of social media.
Let me pause a moment here to say that I’m not enamored with the term “social media” because I don’t see them as communication media at all. The medium is still the Internet. Social sites and their digital brethren are venues for communication to take place—the way a market square or town hall serves as a venue for trade and the spoken word. Their strength—and their potential—is because they are environments and not channels, and lack the control and limitations the latter term implies.
So, what new job skills are likely be relevant when our digitally nurtured progeny move into the workforce? I haven’t a clue. And if the recent past offers any wisdom, it’s that what seems “likely” today is almost certain to look foolish tomorrow, in the unforgiving glare of hindsight.
The better question is: what will business be like? No answers here, either…just a caveat. All business is based on relationships and communication. As transactions go, haggling over a basket of dates in a Middle Eastern village market has virtually nothing in common with running a pre-priced, bar-coded, vacuum-packed Styrofoam tray of dates over a self-serve scanner at Wal-Mart in Chicago…except for the dates. The only certain thing about the new digital environments, and what they will do to commerce and the ways in which we do business, is that they will bring changes, and those changes will be fundamental. As our concept—make that our children’s concept—of community adapts to the still evolving digital world it will affect every area of business…perhaps none more than marketing. The classic four Ps—product, price, place and promotion—will all be forced to obey new rules. The very concept of branding, with its heavy reliance on controlled communication and experience, will be challenged. Business models and marketing plans will need to be written with the flexibility necessary to accommodate new trends in the marketplace that occur overnight—literally.
Future job skills? In recent years our focus has been on training people to use emerging technologies as these began to pervade the workplace. In a very short time technology will define the workplace, and the “skills” that currently concern us will be as intrinsic to the workforce as the use of a computer keyboard is today. And time spent on Facebook, Twitter, and whatever else turns up tomorrow may actually preparing young people for the business world that may be here by the time they graduate college.
Ironically, the most far-reaching effect of technology may well be to level the ground for all of us as distance, appearance, personal hygiene, and other physical characteristics become transparent and increasingly irrelevant. If that does happen, then the most critical “job skills” of the future may well be the ability to think quickly and critically; to take initiative and accept risk; and to build relationships through communication, understanding, personality, and mutual respect. And won’t that be a challenge for the educational system?
