Preparing Technicians for the Future of Work

As technology evolves so tasks and occupations transform. We know that demand for some positions involving tasks that can be automated are going to decline and in some cases disappear, while entirely new occupations will emerge. When we say technology, what the technologies are we talking about? We mean advanced manufacturing, engineering technology, biotechnology, information and security technologies, including cybersecurity, and agricultural and environmental technologies. Every one of these technologies focuses on the fields in which we need a skilled technical workforce. This week our podcast host introduces some of the challenges in hiring and training workers in a rapidly changing workplace.

Over the last ten years, the skills gap has increasingly been the subject of business roundtables, government agency forums and think tank research. Employers report struggling to find new workers with the skills they need. This means that both entry-level employees and incumbent workers need upskilling. Our guest in this episode says that if you think you're going to hire somebody off the street that knows how to press every button, forget it. So who owns this skills gap?

We struggle so often in our classrooms and in the larger educational systems to encourage women to participate and when they do participate, to persist in technology programs. Technical program enrollments seldom have more than 20% women. On the industry side, high tech also faces challenges in gender equity. Guests Alexa Frank and Rachael Munkacsi, Deloitte, and Hope Cotner, CORD, discuss how some of the strategies and lessons learned from Deloitte’s work on designing equality in the workplace translate to the classroom environment.