We've been speaking with top economist and organizational
experts to better understand how the US is going to get back to
the office post pandemic. Today, I'm speaking with Rachel Lipson.
She's the founding director of the Project on Workforce at
Harvard University. Thanks so much for meeting with me.
Thanks for having me, great to talk with you today.
So broadly, what do you see as the future of work as we get
back to the office post pandemic.
I'm watching a few big trends at this particular moment when it
is with respect to the future of work. The first is what's going
to be the final share of remote and, and hybrid work. The second
is I think there's a fundamental rethinking in this moment of
kind of the connection between education and work. And what
does it look like to create transitions from our education
system into good jobs, the future of work in a lot of ways
is dependent on the future of education and how it adapts to
changing worker preferences, changing demographics, and a
growing share of adult learners who have a lot of other things
going on in their life and are wondering whether the education
system is going to shift and adapt to catch up to them. A
third final area that I'm watching with respect to the
future of work is just the ways in which technology is changing
the types of jobs and roles that are available. So a huge
challenge for a country is going to be whether we can kind of
create systems that allow people to change roles, sectors
industries more easily and more smoothly to kind of grow with
technology, rather than being left behind by it.
Um, you've touched on this a little bit. So what's wrong with
the US job training program that we have right now? And what do
you think will fix it?
Our job training infrastructure is kind of stuck in the 1960s.
We have a system that was designed for manufacturing jobs,
and a lot of sort of field trades and work that is kind of
manual in nature. And we created a bunch of pretty good systems
that were set up to train people for those types of roles. But
the structures that you have for those types of jobs are not
necessarily easily replicable in growing industries like
healthcare or technology industries, like manufacturing,
we have great apprenticeship programs and work based learning
opportunities where people can be working and make money and
learn on the job. In most other fields, we have not created
structured pipelines that allow you to be in these types of paid
on the job experiences. So that's one struggle for the US
on this front.
A second is that we basically under invested in this whole
area. So the vast majority of US spending on education happens
before the age of 22, we spend a tiny share a fraction of of the
dollars that we spend on young people on adults, the US ranks
second to last in all of OECD on active labor market policies,
which are the types of spending that helps stimulate employment,
invest in job training, job search support, this is
something we just have over the last few decades, completely
neglected in a lot of ways.
I think a third factor that contributes here is that our
historically our primary source of job training in the US has
been the community college system, that is the most
important institution. And again, relative to four year
institutions, we have decided to basically give less money to
institutions that are actually serving a harder to serve
population, working parents, older learners, more students of
color. And I think if we were to rethink how we think about job
training in this country, at the first level, it's really going
to require a fundamental investment and scaling of
programs through our community college systems. And hopefully,
working alongside those institutions and employers to
update our programs so that they actually match where the current
demands in the economy are. I don't know if this resonates for
you. But even in my educational experience. It wasn't such a
nice, smooth linkage between what you learned in the
classroom and then actually getting into career and getting
into a job. And I think there's a lot that the US can learn from
other countries.
Which industries do you expect to grow in the next 10 years?
And which do you think will shrink?
Really focused on healthcare right now, I think there's going
to be a fundamental rethinking for some of these healthcare
roles, and how do we increase job quality and then also
simultaneously increase upward mobility pathways? So how do you
actually make it so people in healthcare who start off in some
of these entry level and lower paying roles can actually access
a ladder to getting into a higher paid better jobs. A
second big sector and focus for the US will be IT or technology.
A lot of the research that that we're seeing at Harvard in
particular, my colleague, David Deming, who is the co director
on the faculty side of the Project on Workforce. He
emphasizes that, at the same time we train for technology
skills, we also need to be training for social skills. So
there's a huge growing focus on communication, teamwork,
resilience, adaptability. These are the types of things that
can't be replaced by technology. And so even for roles in the
tech sector that requires significant technical skills,
we're also gonna see a growing demand for for workers who
really have these kind of human social skills and can kind of
pair the two.
You said hat 90% of the work that used to be done by humans
is now done by machines, so that's the advance of
potentially AI. So where do you see jobs growing in the next 20
years with the incorporation of technology? And do you think
that we have earned a UBI?
No, I actually use that 90% of jobs that were used to be done
by humans, are are now being done by machines as a sign that
we shouldn't be as worried as some are that the robots are
taking over, which is to say that, you know, technology has
changed over the course of US history consistently, and human
jobs have changed with it alongside it. So one job might
be lost, but we can create a new job that actually is alongside
the technology. So no one is driving around in horse and
buggies anymore, but the technology around the subways,
not that it runs by itself you need humans that maintain and
support and grow the technology and manage it. So I think that's
all to say that what's going to be important for US economy over
the coming decades is, as we invest in technology and AI
grows, and we see returns to machine learning and automation,
I think there will be lots of new human jobs that grow
alongside that technology. The question is whether we're gonna
sufficiently invest in education and in people so that they can
keep up with the changes and benefit equitably and grow with
it. So to me, that's the biggest challenge, because the types of
jobs that this new technology is going to create are going to
require significant post secondary education and
training. And we need to scale up our ability to have more
people have access to the learning that they need, whether
in traditional education systems or actually on the job learning
alongside the technology as it's deployed in work. I'm optimistic
about our ability to do so. And I think if we can do it, well,
UBI won't be required. And there will potentially be other and
better ways to spend spend that money to support some of the
workers who have been most adversely affected by
technological change.
So as you're talking about these soft skills, and in the wake of
the Black Lives Matter movement, how do we fight discrimination,
when hiring looking for these social skills?
We know that our hiring systems to date have been completely
embedded with discriminatory practices. And so when we've
left the assessment of soft skills to humans, or too often
bias assessment tests, the results have not been good. I
actually do think that there is a big role for technology here,
if done thoughtfully to help level the playing field, open
the aperture to millions of new workers who might have
historically been overlooked if you only relied on network based
hiring of who do you know, and who has a degree from your
university. So I'm encouraged with with some caution about the
ability of new hiring platforms and new hiring tools to expand
the aperture. What we just need to be careful about, and my
colleague, Joe Fuller actually has some new work on this called
Hidden Workers is how do we ensure that AI isn't used to
actually cut out people from consideration through things
like do they have a gap in their resume? Do they have a college
degree? For some jobs, those types of AI filters
automatically remove from consideration hundreds or 1000s
of potential diverse workers who can enter a company's pipeline.
As you're talking about diversity in hiring it's also
about diversity and retaining employees. So how can we create
a better flexible work environment for people whose
jobs rely on in person activities?
I think there's a few areas I would think about. The first for
in person work is availability of childcare. And this is going
to be an issue that cuts across sectors. So I don't think the
private sector alone is going to solve it. Government has to be
part of the answer here. But we're going to need
collaboration across the firm's that employ parents or
caregivers of other family members, but particularly for
parents, we're going to need government to help on the
funding side and then collaboration as well with the
providers who are also struggling to find enough
workers to fill key childcare roles at this moment. A second
is just around flexible work scheduling, and how do we enable
more amenable patterns for people to tap into, so that they
can actually have schedules that allow them to fulfill their
child caring responsibilities, and then a third area, I think
that relates is just going to be around commuting and transit
times. So again, it's not just the work day, if you're a
working parent, and you add two hours in both directions for
your commute, that's a huge factor that remote work has
eliminated for people of how much more time you can spend
with your family if you remove the commute from the equation.
So I think it's a call for investment in in public
transportation and better transit infrastructure.
Would our economy be able to function if let's say, we move
to a mostly flexible or mostly remote work environment?
I don't think we're there yet, in terms of being in a mostly
remote environment. But I think that the there are a lot of
positive signs from the the remote work experiment of the
last year and a half that make me pretty bullish on on hybrid
work. That said, we really need to be concerned on these and
keep a close eye on these equity questions of who benefits and
who loses how do we equalize the playing field when people might
have stronger returns to being in person depending on their
race, or class or, or gender, and we want to make sure that
that doesn't affect advancement patterns or retention patterns.
So really, it would be strongly encouraging firms to keep keep
close data survey your workers really watch out for those those
hiccups. But at the end of the day, if workers have said this
is what we what we want, and there's strong signs that they
can be equally productive in a working from home some number of
days a week, I think it's a win for for American workers if
they're able to improve their quality of life in significant
ways.
The final thing I just that would say, though, is there are
some concerns about what's lost from innovation and creativity
and teamwork. And a huge open question right now that I don't
think research has fully answered is how do we kind of
replicate in an online setting some of the magic that happens
when people are together in a room in an office space trading
ideas, around socializing, stopping in all of those kinds
of informal social activities have higher returns to creating
big and better ideas and innovation in the economy. And I
think there's been a lot of positive developments on how
technology has adapted during this time to allow people to
collaborate in an online setting, but we haven't really
been able to prove yet whether it is fully capable of providing
that kind of human interaction, the magic of social skills and
teamwork that we would see in in person settings.