We need more sophisticated ways to envision possible scenarios in preparing for the skills of tomorrow. We know less about technologies than we think.
The preoccupation with disruptive technologies has also eclipsed other issues with potentially transformative effects – climate change and political responses, demographic shifts that threaten to cripple health care systems, changing social norms and values, patterns of migration. These all have implications for the future of work and skills. Tapping into more sophisticated approaches to envisaging possible futures and scenarios would better inform adaptive, agile responses.
Planning when you cannot predict is fraught. In the ’90s, John Roth, president of Nortel Networks, insisted that Canada’s burgeoning ICT sector was threatened by skills shortages and we needed to “double the pipeline” for engineers. Ontario complied, diverting resources from other disciplines to gear up for the explosive demand. Then, Nortel and the dot-com market collapsed, leaving us with under-employed engineers. Organizations like the Canadian Advanced Technology Association (CATA) pronounced that “Technological skills are not the only need….Marketers are harder to find than engineers.” While deep technology skills are essential, we need to avoid creating reductive binaries that position choices as either how hard is computer science.
The preoccupation with disruptive technologies has also eclipsed other issues with potentially transformative effects – climate change and political responses, demographic shifts that threaten to cripple health care systems, changing social norms and values, patterns of migration. These all have implications for the future of work and skills. Tapping into more sophisticated approaches to envisaging possible futures and scenarios would better inform adaptive, agile responses.
Planning when you cannot predict is fraught. In the ’90s, John Roth, president of Nortel Networks, insisted that Canada’s burgeoning ICT sector was threatened by skills shortages and we needed to “double the pipeline” for engineers. Ontario complied, diverting resources from other disciplines to gear up for the explosive demand. Then, Nortel and the dot-com market collapsed, leaving us with under-employed engineers. Organizations like the Canadian Advanced Technology Association (CATA) pronounced that “Technological skills are not the only need….Marketers are harder to find than engineers.” While deep technology skills are essential, we need to avoid creating reductive binaries that position choices as either how hard is computer science.
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