None of the four largest companies on earth existed when my parents left school. Two of them didn’t exist when I started secondary school and the seventh largest company on the planet didn’t even exist when I finished university. If I was 60, you’d say big deal, but I’m 36 and I only left university 14 years ago. Moreover, my kids are five and three and there’s every chance that the largest companies when they leave school won’t only have not been founded but could be in industries that we don’t even know are possible.
That pace of change is exciting but also pretty scary, especially if you’re at school and trying to make decisions about which qualifications will best meet the needs of a future career. It also means that occupations will come and go more quickly and that has an obvious impact on job security too. The days of joining an employer at 16 and leaving with a nice carriage clock and pension at sixty are over for the vast majority of us.
Preparing our children for a world of work with lots of opportunity but little job security is a big challenge. Great grades in academic subjects taught by first class schools will be as important as ever but an affinity with technology will be essential too. When I was in the Army, there were senior officers who made a virtue of not ‘doing’ technology. Yet just a few years later, it is inconceivable that somebody could command a modern battle without a complete understanding of what is going on in cyberspace too. That doesn’t mean that only people with the technical nous of Bill Gates can command our armed forces or run our biggest companies but it does mean that they must be able to work comfortably alongside and see the opportunities within technologies as they emerge.
This isn’t limited to the boardroom either. British manufacturing is going through a renaissance and hundreds of thousands of jobs have been created as a result. On many of those production lines, however, skilled workers are operating seamlessly alongside robots. Indeed many of them will originally have been employed to do the work the robots now do. It was that willingness to upskill and work in a more technologically advanced workspace that might have meant they kept their job on the new automated production line whilst others were losing theirs.
This technology driven pace of change in our nation’s workplaces underlines the importance of the Prime Minister’s plans for a new T Level. University has been the catalyst for career advancement for many but there are others who might reasonably reflect that they’ve taken on the student debts to end up in a job for which their degree is no advantage. For many of them, more technical qualifications at school followed by apprenticeships in industry would have certainly led to a better financial situation and probably quicker career progress as well.
To illustrate this point, I like to tell sixth formers in my constituency about a man I met when visiting Airbus in Bristol last year. He was 22 and had been working his way through various levels of apprenticeship with Airbus since he was 16. With overtime, he was pocketing almost £30,000 a year, he had no student debts, was qualified to degree level and was two years in to paying off his mortgage. He was completely at ease on a production line making wings for military cargo aircraft surrounded by technology and highly skilled colleagues. If Airbus ever found a robot who could do what he does, I’m certain that he’d have the core technical competence to quickly re-skill and take a new opportunity elsewhere in that factory or in a new industry altogether.
Automation, digitisation and the increased use of artificial intelligence are seen as a threat by some. Undoubtedly, those technologies will replace many of the things that humans do in many of our workplaces but that doesn’t mean that technology is about to make us all unemployed. Occupations will come and go more quickly, careers spent with a single company will be much less common, and instead we will need to re-skill and change career more often.
Preparing our children for that reality is vital. If A Levels and university is their path it cannot be to the exclusion of the tech-savviness that will allow them to innovate and maximise their potential in the modern workplace. And if university isn’t for them, the Prime Minister’s T Levels should be the obvious choice. Not as a fall back but as another – equally valued - route to a successful career.
Published by The Sunday Express, Sunday, September 10th 2017