Tomorrow’s tasks demand action today

Interpreting surveys has become a risky business of late. But I want to give you my take on a recent University of Technology Sydney survey that asked what job our students aspired to, and found that almost 40 per cent of them aspired to none at all.

It’s a finding that’s startling at first glance. But it makes sense if you understand artificial intelligence and automation, and it shows us all how Australia’s journey into the automation age can be a positive one.

First, let’s understand clearly the challenge of automation and jobs. McKinsey Australia has done some leg work here in its 2019 report, Australia’s Automation Opportunity.

It reveals that while automation has been happening for decades, the complexity and breadth of what can be automated is rapidly scaling up.

Automation is no longer the province of manual or repetitive tasks, so the complexity of what we can automate will soon affect every job and profession. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures back up this reality, showing as they do declining trends in “routine manual” and “routine cognitive” jobs for the past decade.

With that background, McKinsey has estimated that up to 6.5 million Australian jobs will be changed by automation and ­artificial intelligence in the next decade. Some jobs will go. Some jobs will emerge. But all jobs will change.

How Australia prospers in the face of that change will hinge on how we act now to tackle one of the greatest shifts in skills, knowledge and assumptions we have ever undertaken.

It requires an approach to education where individuals can expect to spend 30 per cent of their time in education and training, from the age of three right through to 100. The foundations of our educational, business and social services need to respond to that reality. Universities must also change how they operate, and in how they educate the workforce of today and tomorrow.

Universities, vocational training institutes and schools need to adopt a flexible and modular approach to deliver against this lifelong expectation of reskilling and redevelopment. We need to move to a system where an individual can move seamlessly between university, TAFE and informal and employer-provided education.

For all of us, this change requires a dramatic shift in our assumptions about what “a good job” means. We need to openly expect our own jobs to change, even vanish, and to master new ones — so much so that if our jobs are not changing, we should be asking: “Why not?” In this regard, those students who superficially “don’t want a job” are already a step ahead of many of us. You see, they don’t want a job offered to them, but only because they are too busy creating their own jobs.

Some are focused on starting their own businesses. They are developing new technology and products. Others aim at being more active in managing their role or multiple roles in an existing firm. They are already envisaging a life of work built around project-by-project engagements. They have an entrepreneurial approach to career development.

Most importantly, they have already shattered the perception that education is a fixed experience of youth, which then sends us out on a linear path through life. Being educated a single time, for a single career, is no more logical than pledging a lifelong commitment to one type of mobile phone.

In this sense, students are modelling a mindset that we all need to move to if we are going to make the most of the opportunities that automation offers. These include increased productivity, higher-paid jobs, and a greater focus across all jobs on non-routine tasks — the very tasks that machines struggle with, yet humans gain the highest satisfaction from.

How, then, can the rest of us follow that mindset? The education sector must continue to move towards supporting critical thinking, making sense of things in a human way and learning those general skills alongside disciplinary knowledge.

Business and industry urgently need to reverse the declining spend in training, and the historic focus on simplistic task mastery. To accelerate and prioritise non-routine skills and broader capability development over routine tasks. To acknowledge that the skills they need in the future can’t simply be hired in, but have to be created. Most important of all, business, government and education sectors need to jointly develop systems to allow workers to engage in education and reskilling in a supported way, and at any time of life. The term “mature-aged student” should be confined to history.

At the same time, we need to be completely alive to the fact that many people are daunted by the prospect of increasing education in late career, but the opportunities this presents can and should benefit everyone. And finally, parents still clinging to aspirations of a great traditional profession for their child will come to understand that embracing flexible, connected education choices is not a sign of failure but quite the opposite.

After all, the difference between evolution and extinction is adaptability.

The more we readily expect change, the greater our chances and choices are in response to it. This is true of both individuals and nations.

Attila Brungs is vice-chancellor of the University of Technology Sydney.