IT and workforce; a complicated relationship

As the relationship between technology and work continues to evolve, concerns abound, including its effects on jobs, education and business. The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine took a deeper look at the relationship and its impact, convening an expert committee to delve into the topic and set forth a research agenda. The resulting report, Information Technology and the U.S. Workforce: Where Are We and Where Do We Go from Here, explores the current state, trends, and possible futures of technology and work, as well as the possible implications for education, privacy, security and even democracy.

The 13-member expert committee that was convened to explore the topic more thoroughly, met to discuss the trends in technology and the workforce. They conducted a workshop, sought public input from more leaders and reviewed current research to inform the report. Considering the issue from economic, organization, individual worker and societal levels, the authors identify key issues and questions for policy makers and suggest new research paths and data-collection efforts to help improve monitoring future impacts. For instance, they anticipate the rapid pace of IT advances to continue or accelerate, which will likely lead to mobile robots like self-driving vehicles. As those capabilities mature and become more widespread, employment will be impacted with decreased demand for drivers in the transportation sector. Further technical progress in automating assembly lines may allow some reshoring of apparel and furniture as labor in other countries is devalued. Other trends involve increasing computer capabilities in speech and video, which could possibly play into security jobs and employment. Text reading by computers could lead to automating knowledge-worker jobs, such as paralegal researchers and news reporters.

The report also asserts that technological changes have implications for the economy. It is more than the changes and new technologies themselves, but the ideologies, power structures and human aspirations and agendas will shape how an economy shifts to absorb the new knowledge. Limitations of measurement are noted, where outputs of productivity are more difficult to measure (outputs for medical treatments and finance, for instance, vs. counting bushels of corn).

Another variable considered is the way education and vocational training might need to adapt to the accommodate new technologies and existing skills. While the education system was able to increase the availability of workers in the early 20^th century during rapid technological change, the authors state that simply investing more money in the same sort of education will not reduce inequality. Instead, more “out-of-the-box” thinking will be necessary to identify fixes through the educational system, with the report suggesting that greater numeracy skills and abstract thinking skills will be important to the future workforce. However, an emphasis on any fixed set of skills would be backward thinking, the authors contend, and instead say that flexibility will be a valued skill, “one that may be particularly underprovided by the current schooling system — in particular, to enable lifelong learning and adaptability to a changing labor market.”

As traditional organizations transform, questions arise surrounding benefits and worker security. If organizations turn to less-secure, shorter-term employment, workers may not be able to weather an unemployment spell. One option may be portable pension plans administered by membership organizations, the report posits.

The changing nature of work and technology will require further research to help reveal the range of potential outcomes of policy and other choices. New data and methods would enable such research and the authors assert that “the research community would be well served by data collection designed to support longitudinal tracking and analysis of workforce trends and the role of advances in IT.” To have a well-informed policy discussion, the committee recommends that the federal agencies or other organizations should establish a sustained, multidisciplinary research program to address the important questions about IT, the changing nature of work and its impact on the economy.