 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Find more Kappan articles of interest RESEARCH: Skills for the Future
AT AGE 57, Barbara Ehrenreich, a biology Ph.D. and former New York Times columnist, accepted a magazine editor's challenge to spend two years working at low-paid jobs (in the book, she credited years of weight lifting and aerobics for her ability to endure the task). The kinds of jobs she held are the kinds of jobs becoming more prevalent and not possible to offshore: waitressing, dietary aide in an old age home, Wal-Mart sales. They're the kinds of jobs many of us had in high school and college. We knew we were only temporarily stuck in them. Ehrenreich knew her stint would end, too, but in some ways she had a tougher tour because she had to find housing, transportation, and food. What Ehrenreich says she needed to learn are what we usually think of when we say "skills." But recent studies of both high- and low-paying jobs indicate there's a lot more to it than that. Food servers don't just serve food. They must take orders, get drinks, put orders into computers, answer questions, bring food, and balance as many plates at once as possible, all the while being as nice as possible. They face emotional hazards from customers whose meals might arrive over- or undercooked or who are just having a bad day. At non-peak hours, they must put out sugar and creamers, prep foods, sweep floors, wipe counters, stock glasses and plates. These last duties are often called "sidework," but they keep the restaurant functioning smoothly and ease the transitions between shifts. A June 2007 workshop on "Research Evidence Related to Future Skills Demands," sponsored by the National Academies, produced some visions of the work force of the future that are quite different from the all-too-common more-mathematicians, more-scientists, more-engineers scenarios. The service economy accounts for only 20% of all occupations, but it accounts for 76% of all jobs. Virtually none of the jobs in the service sector can be offshored. Mary Gatta and Eileen Appelbaum of Rutgers University and Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic and Policy Research contend that we need to know a lot more about what this work actually entails. We know less about these service jobs than we do about high-skilled jobs because the service jobs are mostly low-wage and the skills they require are akin to those that Ehrenreich listed and are not well defined by such skill proxies as educational attainment. According to Gatta, Boushey, and Appelbaum, this leads to a set of biases about what the jobs that rely on these skills entail: Because service occupations are disproportionately comprised of women, minorities, and recent immigrants, we must carefully evaluate whether the skills required are not clouded by bias or notions of what is "natural" for these particular groups. The gendered composition of these jobs and, more importantly, the nature of the skills needed to perform the work contribute to their characterization as low-skill and low-wage. Indeed, emotional work, caring labor, and relationship building are typically associated with women and mothering. The assumption follows that these jobs do not necessitate skill acquisition, complex communication, or expert knowledge, but instead rely on natural qualities of women. This reasoning then justifies the widely held view that workers should not be paid well for this work as they are not performing skilled work. Indeed, it was not until Arlie Russell Hochschild's 1983 research on airline attendants that people became aware of "emotional work" and the stress that managing emotions creates. Attendants and others in similar positions must display a set of emotions that the employer wants, not what they might actually be feeling, in order for the customer to feel the emotions the employer wants. Similarly, caring work requires skills that are different from knowing algebra. Nurses, health-care assistants, child-care workers, social workers, and, of course, teachers deliver caring work. Service work is "a delicate game where the worker must develop skills that can discern a customer's needs, select, then adapt social scripts to meet those needs." Restaurant workers, for instance, abandoned the scripts employers set for them and "engaged in numerous practices to deal with the emotions that they were experiencing within workplace interactions. Servers chose, disregarded, altered, and created different scripts based on the unique characteristics of the micro-social context. Flexibility, creativity, and adaptability then become important skills." While Gatta, Boushey, and Appelbaum looked at service workers, Asaf Darr of the University of Haifa examined the future skill demands for knowledge workers. Darr notes that we don't have agreement on how to define either "knowledge worker" or "skill." In one of two dominant uses a skill is seen as an attribute of the person that is quantifiable and comparable across people, maybe even comparable across nations. The problem with this definition is that it is usually presented in terms of a proxy, educational attainment, which oversimplifies the complexities of the real work world. Obviously, not every college graduate carries the same set of skills. A second view sees any human activity as complex and does not link skills to schooling but to on-the-job training. People who hold this view contend that cognitive skills are not superior to manual skills and that the two are always intertwined. "Knowledge worker" is a broad term covering teachers, lawyers, computer programmers, etc. What kind of knowledge is used by knowledge workers? Well, formal knowledge, of course. This is what school critics are always yelling that our kids should get more of. But other types of knowledge might be more important. Consider two examples. Contextual knowledge. In studies of technical work, workers were seen to deal with unanticipated problems and had to piece together the information necessary for a solution from the situation (i.e., the context) itself. In the past, we might have referred to contextual knowledge informally as the ability to "size up" a situation or "structure" a problem. Tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is acquired by experience and cannot be transferred by formal means. It can be transferred only by personal experiences, social ties, and shared practice. We used to call people with lots of tacit knowledge the "old hand" or "the veteran." After laying out the definitions, Darr describes what he contends is an important trend: the growing interdependence of service and knowledge work. This is not the kind of work that Ehrenreich or Gatta, Boushey, and Appelbaum were talking about. Darr has highly skilled work in mind, especially the jobs defined as "sales engineer," a term that will sound odd to many ears. The shift, Darr claims, comes from a shift from sales of products to sales of processes. A product has a clear, dedicated function: a car is to drive. A process, though, contains a great deal of ambiguity: a printer is a dedicated computer, but most computers are flexible; a circuit board is more flexible still, for it can be adapted to any number of applications. The people who might be interested in buying a circuit board have some ideas about what they want to do with it. But they have to obtain information from the sellers about what it might be able to do. The people who are interested in selling the circuit board similarly have to ascertain fairly specific information about what applications the buyers have in mind. The traditional salesman lacked the technical knowledge to find this fit. The traditional engineer had little interest in sales. Darr describes the situation as one of "product ambiguity" and "client uncertainty." Clearly, to best determine the fit, the sales engineer needs many interpersonal skills, along with technical and critical thinking skills. Research indicates that sales engineers seldom visit more than one client a month and that their visits last about a week. They meet with the client's design and test engineers, negotiate technical features of the client's application, diagnose and solve technical problems, and offer training sessions. In contrast to standardization, certainty, and planning, which were the pillars of the Industrial Age, Darr thinks that product ambiguity and client uncertainty are the pillars of the Information Technology Age. And that has consequences for education: The growth of a techno-service sector poses a substantial challenge to our educational institutions, which tend to view knowledge workers as the ideal type of industrial R&D engineers or scientists. I suggest that simply offering students more of the same (e.g., enhancing science and math classes in K-12 and undergraduate programs) will not create a better fit between many of the graduates and future labor market demands. Instead, new types of skills such as interactive social skills should be integrated into engineering and scientific training. Both papers implicitly assume that education should be more targeted to the work force than I think it should be. But neither perspective sounds much like No Child Left Behind, does it? These and the other five papers commissioned for the workshop are most readily obtained by putting the title of the workshop into Google. 1. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), p. 193. GERALD W. BRACEY is an associate for the High/Scope Foundation, Ypsilanti, Mich. His most recent book is Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered (Heinemann, 2006). He can be reached at gbracey1@verizon.net. |
|
|
