14
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 14 OCTOBER, 2018
DISTINGUISHED OPEN LECTURE
PROFESSOR RONALD JACOBS:
Lost your job? Retrain.
Sometimes, as fast as you train people for one job,
the very nature of the job (or the industry) changes,
and you need to re-train people in an entirely different
kind of way, sometimes for entirely different kinds
of work. Such is the dizzying rate of change in the
workplace today, where technology is revolutionizing
many processes, and where people can no longer rely
on lifelong employment doing just one rote job forever.
Things change, sometimes rapidly, and employees may
find themselves casualties in obsolete jobs or dying
industries unless they adapt or retrain for new kinds
of work.
This was just part of the message shared by
Professor Ronald Jacobs last month when he gave the
Distinguished Open Lecture atThe UWI St Augustine
campus on the evening of September 13. Human
Resource professionals as well as curious members of
the public flocked to the Daaga Auditorium to hear
him speak. Jacobs is Professor of Human Resource
Development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, and a leading scholar in his field. He
previously worked at Ohio State University where he
is Professor Emeritus, and he is the principal of RL
Jacobs & Associates, a global consulting firm.
Prof Jacobs did an early first degree in FilmStudies
and English Literature in 1973 before studying for
a doctorate in Instructional Systems Technology at
Indiana University some years later. Since then, his
career has been focused on human resource and
workforce training issues, and he has been called the
world’s subject matter expert on structured on-the-
job training. He has authored or edited six books on
human resource development, and is working on a new
book on work analysis (documenting what people do
in their jobs), due out in 2019.
His talk at UWI on “Knowledge work, workforce
development and the emerging digital age: New
challenges for societies and operations” touched on
some of the huge industrial and technological changes
sweeping through societies, requiring new answers to
some core questions about what we train people for,
howorganizations provide learning to boost workplace
performance, how to “manage planned change” to help
individuals adapt; and how to support workers and
their families facing the disaster of job loss.
A widely travelled man, Jacobs has visited South
Korea, China, Saudi Arabia and other parts of the
world to talk about workforce training issues. Jacobs
began his Open Lecture presentation at The UWI,
Trinidad, by mentioning some major world events
he remembers living through: the 1968 domestic
strife in the US, with students protesting American
involvement in the war in Vietnam; the June 1989
protests of Tiannamen Square, where Chinese students
demonstrated in Beijing for a freer, more equitable
society; and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November
1989. Such events became widespread knowledge in an
increasingly globalized world where mass media and
the impacts of industry were creating unprecedented
connections among people and markets, he said. By
1989, the world was becoming more open than it had
ever been before, with far fewer barriers, he said.
Jacobs noted that big social and economic changes
happened especially after 1989 due to a combination of
factors including globalization, technology (especially
the rise of Information Communications Technology),
the “new economy” of “free markets” and cost/price
pressures, political legislation and partnerships,
changing demographics, and the volatility of work,
which has seen a move from stable jobs to sometimes
no job stability at all.
Jacobs took a moment to share a story of profound
change affecting the small town of Johnstown,
Pennsylvania, the place where he himself was
born in 1951. A place with lots of water, coal and
transportation routes, in the 1950s and 60s Johnstown
was a steel town, with more than 30,000 of its people
working in the steel industry and having stable jobs
there. But by 1977, Bethlehem Steel had closed its
Johnstown plant, and by 2000, less than 2,000 local
people worked in the steel industry. It was a crushing
experience for thousands of people, often members of
close-knit families who had all once depended on the
steel mill for their jobs and security, but who found
themselves unemployed. In 2001, Jacobs indicated
the unemployment rate in Johnstown was still 12%.
By 2008, the first wind turbine manufacturing facility
had opened. But Jacobs said by 2015 the town was still
working on its transition from the “Rust Belt” to the
“Health Belt.”
The concept of “workforce development” was not
on anyone’s radar in the US for the longest while, said
Jacobs.There were no partnerships between the public
and private sectors; they each did their own thing. Not
until 1990s did people decide to start using public
monies to think about “workforce development”, a
term the US Federal Government started to use. One
definition of workforce development is:
“The coordination of public and private sector
policies and programmes for the purpose of providing
individuals with the opportunity to achieve and
maintain a sustainable livelihood for the benefit of
themselves, employers, and society as a whole.” (H.
Jacobs and J. Hawley, 2007, Emergence of Workforce
Development).
But what does the term really mean? It is a
collaboration of stakeholders in society with a focus
on employment, said Jacobs. Jacobs said the core
issue here is: How do you prepare individuals to
enter the workforce? He then spoke about various
training avenues, including post-secondary vocational
education; dual work-learning systems; government
training programmes and universities. He spoke briefly
of occupational analysis, and the notion of National
Occupational Standards which some (not all) countries
have established. Germany, the UK and Korea have
national workforce approaches with standards set
for different occupations, whereas the USA does not
(individual USA states have their own approaches, but
it is not national).
You can’t make an advanced society by workers
doing simple, repetitive tasks, said Jacobs, as he
launched into the whole concept of “knowledge
work.” The worker of the future is knowledgeable:
he or she knows how to think critically, use creativity
and cognitive skills to solve problems, knows how to
work and learn in teams, and uses both judgment and
expertise to choose and act appropriately in order to
do a job.
Jacobs noted that “knowledge workers” are not any
exclusive set of people: anyone today might be called
on to do “knowledge work.” The term simply refers to
the ability to troubleshot and solve problems, facilitate
work processes, critically analyze situations, andmake
appropriate decisions, among other qualities, he said.
Jacobs observed how the world has moved from
the mercantile age to the factory or industrial age,
to where we are now: the digital age (also called the
computer or information age). He spoke of the need
for continual workforce planning and training as
conditions change. And at one point, in the public
question session, there was the comment that despite
the changing nature of jobs and industries, “You can’t
worship profits and throw away people.”
ShereenAnnAli
Professor Ronald Jacobs makes a point on September 13 at his UWI
Open Lecture on “Knowledge work, workforce development and the
emerging digital age: New challenges for societies and operations”.
PHOTO: ANEEL KARIM
“The worker of the future is
knowledgeable: he or she knows
how to think critically, use
creativity and cognitive skills to
solve problems, knows how to
work and learn in teams, and uses
both judgment and expertise to
choose and act appropriately in
order to do a job.”
