In this interview, we cover:
Helena Turpin spent 20 years in talent and HR innovation where she solved people-related problems using data and technology. She left corporate life to create GoFIGR where she helps mid-sized organizations to develop and retain their people by connecting employee skills and aspirations to internal opportunities like projects, mentorship and learning.
Andrew Kable is a Skills Acquisition Strategist with extensive experience in recruitment, workforce planning, and job analysis. He has worked with various organizations, helping them align their workforce capabilities with market demands. Learn more about Andrew at Andrew Kable's Website and connect with him on LinkedIn.
Helena 00:00
Well, Andrew, it's lovely to have you. And it's lovely to meet you. Maybe. First up, you're a skills acquisition strategist, and that's an unusual title, let's say, that many of us probably haven't heard before and why I reached out to you in the first place. Could you start by explaining what that is and what you do?
Andrew 00:23
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Helena. So, I recently started my own independent consultancy, and so this is. This title was something that's obviously quite intentionally constructed. And where I'm going with it is that my background is in recruitment. And so I've always been involved in working with organizations across boundaries. So not just looking at what's happening within those organizations, but looking at the broader workforce and making connections between those two.
Andrew 01:00
But with this practice, I'm going, I'm going beyond talent, and what interests me, actually is capability. So what I've been doing is going into organizations looking at the capability they have or that they want, and understanding what skills support that capability in their organization. And so that can be skills that people have, but it could equally also be skills that technology brings.
Helena 01:33
Yeah. Okay.
Andrew 01:35
Looking at how they're bundling up. Those skills into jobs or tasks, and with a critical eye. And the critical eye is informed by what's going on in the external skills supply chain, if you like, the labor force. And so are they assembling their skills into jobs in such a way that aligns with the availability of people in the workforce.
Helena 02:07
Got it. And so you've done some really interesting work, haven't you, recently with a company called Aushelp, and you. Exactly this. Can you tell us more about what you did there? And I guess, what was the problem that they were looking to solve that brought you there?
Andrew 02:27
Yeah, so this is an organization which is a charitable foundation and they have this really great mission. I absolutely love what these guys do. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to prevent suicide in high risk industries. So they're looking particularly that sort of dual focus at the moment is the construction industry, which is where they're kind of where they're from, and then the trucking industry as well. So those industries are characterized by being hard to reach and so the people in those industries often won't avail themselves of wellbeing services.
Helena 03:11
Right.
Andrew 03:12
They're also hard for well being organisations to reach. So they're hard to reach, but they're also high risk. And so those industries have some inherent qualities where you really can't or it's difficult to eliminate the psychosocial risks involved in that work. And so you've got these people, mostly young men, sometimes older Mendez, but mostly men who are in these high risk environments with often with very little support around them. So Ozhelp exists to try and connect those people to wellbeing services with the end goal of preventing suicide in those industries. So they were having quite a bit of trouble with both attracting and retaining staff.
Helena 04:11
Right.
Andrew 04:12
So that was, you know, that's in part because, you know, they're a not for profit organization. They're not. They're not paying really high salaries. So they can't, they can't just solve their problems by throwing money at them.
Helena 04:23
Can't buy. Okay. Or buying.
Andrew 04:25
Yeah, buying's hard. But also they're doing something that's quite unique. Which was actually hard for them to see from their perspective. And I think this is one really interesting feature of organizations and skills, is often the thing that organizations are best at, the most critical skills that are largely invisible to them, is that because they're already good at them, do you think? Yeah, okay. Yeah. Generally it's because they're good at them or it's just what they always do.
Andrew 05:01
And so they may not or often don't appreciate how difficult it is to do the thing that they're doing. They've got capability at. So, um. They were having trouble attracting people, but they were also having trouble retaining people. And so what I did was I went in and had a look at and spoke to their staff members and conducted quite extensive and detailed interviews to understand what their days look like, what tasks they were doing, what the context of their work was, you know, looking particularly for things that are more difficult, I guess. And when I say difficult here, I mean there are fewer people in the workforce who can do them.
Helena 06:00
Got it.
Andrew 06:01
So. And then looking at how they were bundling those tasks up into different jobs.
Helena 06:09
Yeah.
Andrew 06:10
And then I went through a process for them where I then did a desktop analysis, where I looked at the availability of those critical skills in the workforce, how those skills were bundled up typically within other occupations, to see whether the type of people they were looking for actually existed in the world.
Helena 06:31
And are you allowed to share if they do?
Andrew 06:34
Um, they do, but it's a pretty unusual skill mix.
Helena 06:41
Okay.
Andrew 06:42
And, um, I. And this goes to also sort of definitions of skills. Like, some of the skills that they require of people are things that, you know, probably not going to appear in a lot of work skill taxonomies. I'm a big fan of the American Department of Labor's Onet. Their occupation has a really awesome range of dimensions that they classify occupations with. And so one of the skills that they require of people in their organization is to actually go and be on site with the workers.
Helena 07:25
And that's a skill.
Andrew 07:28
Yeah, because they actually require people to be outdoors a large portion of their working week.
Helena 07:34
Okay.
Andrew 07:36
Um, and being outdoors in Onet, just, they call it a work context.
Helena 07:43
Right. Okay. Makes sense.
Andrew 07:45
But if you look at it from a kind of ethnographic or methodological perspective, which is kind of where I come from in my academic studies. You start to see that there's actually a lot of, there's a lot of skills required in being sort of sustaining yourself outdoors.
Helena 08:01
Right.
Andrew 08:03
And it's not just, it's not just knowing, you know, what clothes to wear, how to do layering, you know, when to take your jacket off, when to put your jacket on, not to trip up a big hole in the floor. Yeah. Or, you know, bring, you know, bring a hot thermos with you on a cold morning. Yeah. But also, your body physiologically adjusts when you have to be outdoors, a lot like your body, your physical response to temperature change becomes more skilled. It's a sort of corporeal skill that allows your body to respond quickly, to warm itself up and cool itself down with big changes of temperature. And so.
Andrew 08:56
What you find is that if you look through occupations that require people to be outdoors. Not. There are very, very few of those occupations that also require advanced affective skills. So being able to regulate emotions in the self and in others, like so, there's almost.
Helena 09:21
Nothing stack, isn't it? It's the stack that makes that complicated.
Andrew 09:24
Exactly.
Helena 09:25
Got it.
Andrew 09:26
They're requiring people who have the skill, I'm going to call it a skill of working outdoors a lot. Plus people who are able to navigate quite complicated conversations. Really quite complicated conversations.
Helena 09:48
Yeah.
Andrew 09:50
Yeah. And then they're also laying a whole bunch of other stuff on top of that as well. And so for the people in that organization that's just there every day, that just seems normal to them.
Helena 10:03
Business as usual.
Andrew 10:04
The people, the trades that they work with as customers, that's normal for them to be outside all the time has to be normal for us. So I. Was able to, with a bit of quantitative research and looking at the availability, I used a bit of ABS. Data, etcetera. I was able to demonstrate to them the combination of requiring people to. Be on the road and outdoors, like. Physically outdoors.
Andrew 10:36
Exposed to. The elements a lot. Plus this thing of being able to. Manage complex conversations is a very, very. Rare combination. Very rare. You know, you can find it in a few.
Andrew 10:51
A few professions, but a lot of. Those professions. Are, they're. In the government. Sector and. They'Re very well paid. Got it.
Andrew 11:01
Very stable, great pension.
Helena 11:04
Yeah.
Andrew 11:05
Yeah. And often, actually, because there's a recognition of how hard that work is, they also don't have. They're not required. To do a lot, a lot of. Like, visits, if you like.
Helena 11:17
Yeah.
Andrew 11:19
Like if you look at land care outreach, for example, which is a sort. Of almost quite a. Quite a convenient parallel where you have people in. State government is going out and connecting to farmers and understanding what their. Requirements are. You know, those people would probably only do a couple of visits. To farms a day.
Andrew 11:40
Whereas in this sort of not for profit environment, they're expected to have a much higher rate of productivity and maybe not appreciate what, how hard that is. So I was able to give them quite a clearly reasoned report, well backed up with data, to demonstrate that what they were asking their employees to do was probably. Not going to work in a scale up scenario, so just simply aren't enough humans available to do that.
Helena 12:16
Okay.
Andrew 12:17
Yeah. So what I did was I made some recommendations to them around how they should consider dividing up those functions. Like, I saw some potential lines where roles could be demarcated differently. Like, all these things come at a slight cost to the customer experience, but. And that's hard, particularly for organizations like theirs, which is. So they call it patient centered or customer centered.
Helena 12:50
Yeah.
Andrew 12:52
And then I was also able to make some recommendations that if they broke up those jobs differently, here are these quite big pools of talent available that they, and not just any pools of talent, but people who would actually find their work attractive and their salaries attractive and, you know, have plenty of things to learn. And so they'd be bringing in people who were. Whose motivations would be strongly aligned with the work.
Helena 13:26
That's great for attention. Right?
Andrew 13:28
Yeah. And also people who would have things to learn and would see this role as a step up from their current jobs.
Helena 13:36
And there's probably. There were probably other ways that they could have chosen to solve this problem. Right. It sounds like throwing money really wasn't an option. Throwing money at the problem wasn't an option. Why do you think they chose to go to this skills based approach over other alternatives that they might have had or had they tried them and had no success?
Andrew 13:58
Yeah. I mean, they've been. I think it's a problem they've been trying to solve for quite a. Quite a few years. You know, they had. They'd recently had a bit of a leadership change, and so they were looking for other ways to approach the problem.
Helena 14:17
Fresh eyes.
Andrew 14:18
Fresh eyes. Yeah. And what the feedback from the CEO was to me, which I thought was really interesting, was that, you know, they had a hunch, okay. That probably there was an issue with the way they were organizing the work within their organization.
Helena 14:40
Yeah. The job design.
Andrew 14:43
But it's. They didn't have the resources or capability internally to really understand that.
Helena 14:52
Yeah. Because where would you start? Well, I know that you know the answer to that. I see parallels in healthcare. Personally, I think. I look a bit to the US for innovation in healthcare, I think because of the way that the market's funded and paid for. I guess, primarily.
Helena 15:10
It's so much more. Commercial. Industry in the US. But I read a lot about nursing shortages, for example, and that's pretty much true of every country. But I guess the financial. Incentives seem to be higher. In the us market.
Helena 15:28
And I see parallels with what you said in the healthcare market, where it's becoming almost an. Imperative to. Deconstruct some. Of those nursing. And care jobs, in some cases to level up nurses, to take on more clinical tasks that traditionally would have been performed by a doctor, or removing work from a nursing role that doesn't require a qualified nurse to perform those tasks. So I see parallels in other industries. Are there any other kinds of occupations?
Helena 15:58
Or industries that you. See this problem. Existing again and again.
Andrew 16:07
So definitely in industries that require effective work. So that element of being able to manage emotions in others and also manage emotions in yourself and often do actual emotional work. So bring some sort of authentic emotional self to the interaction as well. A lot of those skills, because they've been traditionally seen as private realm skills or women's skills or, you know, skills of the household, they haven't really been, they haven't been valued appropriately.
Helena 16:54
Agree.
Andrew 16:55
And they also haven't had the attention of people like taxonomists. So, you know, even, I think about, about 30 years ago. The earlier version of the US Department of Labor Onet system, it was called DoT. I think they were ranking, you know, midwife work at an equivalent level of complexity to, you know, to clerical work or something like that.
Helena 17:31
It makes me cringe. Okay.
Andrew 17:33
And so they're just these skills systems, these systems of understanding what work is, what work complexity looks like. We're only really starting to understand work which was in that traditional female realm quite recently, and the complexity that lies within it. And so I think systems are still reflecting, it takes a lot of time to build up these systems. And so they're still reflecting what the work that was done back in the eighties on or nineties or often in the seventies or sixties, to be honest.
Helena 18:08
Well, that plays out, what you said plays out very transparently in the recent workplace Gender Equality act salary data, where those traditional caring professions, let's say, or professions that are traditionally occupied by more women, are just paid so much more dismally than other professions.
Andrew 18:31
Yeah. And I think that work is poorly understood and as a consequence, poorly, probably poorly managed as well. And in the past, I think you could kind of get away with that because. Industries could easily pick up people who had really strong, effective skills, but not much education. You and I both worked in the recruitment sector, and that's what the recruitment sector was. You know, making us living out for decades was finding these people with really strong, effective skills, knowledge, and education. No one really wanted to hire them, and so recruitment would hoover them up and really leverage those skills.
Andrew 19:19
But increasingly those people are not just sitting around looking for work. You know, increasingly those skills are valued and also those skills are not just naturally being produced. You know, when you have, when you have young people who interact mostly online. Mm hmm. They may not develop effective skills in the same way.
Helena 19:49
I totally agree with this point. And the tension I feel is that I am a big believer and fan of automation AI progress. I don't wish to stop it, but the concern I have, I guess, for young people entering the workplace is if there are no more supermarket roles because the checkouts are automated, or no more customer service roles because we can use an AI now, where will young people build those foundational skills that you develop by having a horrible customer or a difficult interaction or just learning how to sort of serve, interact through some of those foundational jobs? I do really believe that we're building up towards a reasonably big societal problem.
Andrew 20:30
Yeah. And so we can only start to address those problems if we start to actually understand those skills a bit better, not take them for granted as just skills from the personal realm. Yeah. So nursing is a great example of that. And, you know, in the US, as you alluded to, they actually have such a big hierarchy in that nursing space. You know this, there's five or six levels of people doing nursing roles and you can progress quite. The rungs of the ladder are quite close together.
Andrew 21:15
So you come into hospitals with almost no skills and then you can gradually upskill and gradually get roles that, in theory, less, at least pay better.
Helena 21:32
Still not enough, arguably, yeah.
Andrew 21:34
In Australia, we don't have one. Where we don't have much sophistication yet in how we divide tasks according to level of qualification or skill, for sure.
Helena 21:49
Let's segue into skills a bit more. You and I are both believers in these concepts, right? We wouldn't be doing what we do if we didn't believe in skills based approaches and organizations. But this is a sort of buzzword that crept into the HR vernacular, maybe popularized by Josh Bersans of the world and people like that. But why do you think these types of concepts and terms are gaining traction now?
Andrew 22:21
So I think it's all about the technology opportunity, right? So there's. We now have some very, very big pools of textual data in the form of, you know, LinkedIn. And other, and other systems of sort of big data systems, where there is the opportunity to use what is basically keyword inference at a really big scale. To match people to work. And, you know, that matching people to work is something that everyone's been looking at forever as an opportunity. You know, everyone's trying to disintermediate the recruitment industry and they see, they see there's technology play there.
Andrew 23:28
And, and so that sort of brought this skills concept to the fore because people are like, okay, so we're going to use, we're going to do, you know, keyword matching at massive scale. It's not very compelling to talk about keyword matching, but it's pretty compelling to talk about, about skills. And so I think, and then the marketing efforts from those technology companies have, have brought this, this idea of skills to the fore in the sort of the discursive world around work. So I think that's the reason that people are talking about it now.
Helena 24:14
Do you think it's a fad?
Andrew 24:19
No. No, I don't think so. That I am really. I'm very interested in keyword based skills inference. I think it's a great technology to use at scale. But what I'm hoping is that that technology driven discussion about skills is just the launch pad for a more serious engagement in what a skill actually is and how we align people to work. And so that's why when I use, when I talk about skills based hiring, I'm actually not talking about skills as they reside inside a person that appears on a resume or what have you.
Andrew 25:16
I'm talking about the way that people interact with work. And so when I say skills, I'm talking about something that's not inside a person, but actually that sits between. It's a relational concept. It sits between the person and their environment. Because you can't. I think it's nonsense to say that a skill is something that sits inside people's skin. This doesn't make any sense to me.
Andrew 25:52
A skill is a description of how someone interacts with their environment, actually. So if you want to understand skills, we have to actually look at that interactive or relational piece of. And the more important it is to, you know, the closer that you are to that, to that skill being important. Let me rephrase that. If you're an organization that survives in the world because you're contributing something to the world, it's pretty important that you understand what that is really. Well. And so you don't want to rely on highly generalized, highly abstracted systems to understand that.
Andrew 26:43
Like, you want a thick qualitative understanding of what that is.
Helena 26:48
But most companies don't have that.
Andrew 26:51
No. And that, you know, for some companies, that actually may be, that may be just fine, but I think for other companies, you know. Big companies disappear all the time. And so. Yeah. If you want to, you know, and we're in a period of really significant disruption, so if you. If you're just relying on doing the same thing that you were doing yesterday without really understanding what that thing is, then that may become a problem for you.
Helena 27:27
Well, it's, I would say, now more than ever, that sort of existential crisis, I guess, has been shoved in our face by AI and tools like chatGPT, amongst others. But there's some pretty compelling research out there already to suggest that by 2030, I think it's something. Is it? As much as about 60% of the skills required to perform jobs will have radically shifted. That's World Economic Forum data, I believe, where maybe most of us can't cope with the concept, 2030. I know it's not that far away, but it still seems like a million years off for most of us. Where are you seeing disruption in skills or jobs?
Helena 28:18
Maybe more immediately here and now. Where are you seeing disruption?
Andrew 28:24
Um, so I think. You know, I always take a lot of the hype stuff with a big. Dose of salt. Because I've been, you know, I've worked in industries in the. Past where everybody's, you know, saying massive disruptions on the way.
Helena 28:57
Well, we should be flying around in space, you know, flying cars by now and working 2 hours a week and disappointingly, that hasn't happened yet. Right?
Andrew 29:05
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, there was a. I used to. Be peripherally. Associated with the. Water industry.
Helena 29:12
Yeah.
Andrew 29:13
And 20 years ago, you know, water was. Water was the next oil. And, you. Everyone still thinks that will happen.
Helena 29:19
We just haven't got the time horizon right. But maybe that's a conversation for another day.
Andrew 29:23
Yeah, maybe it will, maybe it won't. It's hard to say. So. But I think you can look at where there are real problems, like really acute workforce problems happening in industries.
Helena 29:39
Give us a few now that you see in the world.
Andrew 29:42
Yeah, well I think the care sector is the classic example.
Helena 29:44
It really is. Yeah.
Andrew 29:46
So there's obviously, like, there's obviously huge, huge problems in that sector.
Helena 29:51
Aging workforce or aging population, shrinking workforce. We talked about some of the sort of less attractive conditions that some of these professions work to. Probably underpaid. Yeah. It's a, that one's happening now, right.
Andrew 30:07
Yeah. And then we do have, I mean this is a very Australia specific problem, but we do have an enormous workforce problem here, which is not really like, it's not driven by these secular trends really. But we want, the government just announced in the budget that they want to have. They've got this kind of made in Australia future industries in Australia strategy. But I've previously done, last year I was doing a lot of research work in advanced manufacturing and. Systems engineering type spaces, like looking for talent, for organizations that need to integrate software and hardware to create these nested systems of systems, control systems, advanced materials, all kind of bundled together. And this is where a lot of the future value in industry is going to come from.
Andrew 31:21
When I saw the latest announcement from the government that they're going to back these certain high tech industries, my immediate thought was, I already know that there's nobody in this country who can do this work.
Helena 31:36
We might be able to offer great tax incentives to companies, but why on earth would they come here if there isn't the labour market supply.
Andrew 31:44
Yeah. You need an ecosystem of organizations to support this work. Otherwise you just end up, if you're in the high tech space, you just end up cannibalizing your own supply chain.
Helena 31:59
Yeah.
Andrew 32:00
So I was looking at certain advanced materials jobs where there are literally five people in the entire country who work in Australia. You go to China or Europe or the, there's, there are thousands and thousands of these people, but we simply don't have that ecosystem.
And that is. That's already a problem for organizations. Are that. Are operating in this space, and that it's. Only going to get more significant if we're trying to, you.
Andrew 32:35
Know, if we're trying to move up the value chain from minerals extraction into, for example, you know, to move beyond. Just digging up. Lithium, but actually. Making batteries, for example. Manufacturing solar cells. Which the government was talking about recently. Yeah.
Andrew 32:55
We have a, we don't, we just. Don'T have the workforce for that. And you can't, you can't. Build it overnight.
Helena 33:05
You raised an interesting point there about mining and mineral extraction. I guess that is something that Australia's pretty well known for. Right. We have. Sort of looming. I don't know about the energy crisis. I'm perhaps not the most educated to really comment on this.
Helena 33:25
But I also see we can't keep digging things out of the ground. Or at least some of those rare earths and rare minerals become increasingly more expensive to mine from the ground and not cost effective. Then we go to energy. So we also mine things like coal that are increasingly not on trend, shall we say. And we're trying to shut down coal fired plants. Do you see any transferability there? So we've got industries that need to shut down certain productions.
Helena 33:57
We've got other industries that need to ramp up. Like, are some of these occupations really transferable? And maybe whose responsibility is it to fix this problem? Because it's kind of everyone's and no one's at the same time. Right?
Andrew 34:13
Yeah. So, like, my, my answer to your first question, like, is that is there a transferability opportunity? It's a qualified yes. Okay. What I found working in this advanced manufacturing space is that there's less transferability than I expected.
Helena 34:39
Really.
Andrew 34:40
From, you know, it's a very, very. Industries with very low tolerances for error.
Helena 34:49
Right. Okay. And does that translate to low appetite, to upskill or reskill? Do they want these people to come kind of fully packaged and good to go?
Andrew 34:58
Well, you know, organizations always want that until they, and they'll always take that if they, if they can get it. But there's a whole different mindset involved in advanced manufacturing. And a lot of the skills for this work are related to quality management at one level or another. It's all, it's all about quality, actually. Qa, like if you, and so if you look to like coal fired power stations, for example.
Helena 35:46
Yeah.
Andrew 35:47
Actually, not a lot of the people in those environments are quality focused. They're not supply chain focused. You know, they're not thinking about supplier quality issues in the same way that they are in more sophisticated industries. So it's, there's not, there's not necessarily, you know, the opportunities are not necessarily as obvious or easy as they appear to be, it would be my comment. Like, you have to, you probably have to look a little bit beyond just the superficial level of what we might optimistically call fast aging skills and more of those durable skill. Opportunities. Yeah.
Andrew 36:46
Which is a bit, you know, it's more work.
Helena 36:49
Do you think that this sort of forces companies' hands to look for cases for automation? So are some of these high precision, high quality, repeatable tasks? I mean, are they great candidates for automation? Are we all going to just automate ourselves out of jobs?
Andrew 37:10
Um, yeah, I mean, I would certainly think that if you think that automation, eliminating jobs is a blue, is a blue collar phenomenon, then you. You're in for a nasty surprise. Right. I think that's it. That's pretty obvious. And in fact, what's proving to be really interesting is that some of them. And this is getting back to this sort of skill as a value, value judgment, political judgment thing.
Andrew 37:42
Some of the jobs that we thought were going to be the first to be automated, like drivers. One of my Australian government contacts was telling me that they were having really serious conversations. In big offices inside Canberra buildings about what they were going to do with all these truck drivers that were going to be out of work in two years.
Helena 38:08
Okay, now the panic's off, right?
Andrew 38:11
Yeah. And now there's no sign really of what the timeline for the automation of truck driving is like. Will be decades away, you think? Yeah, I mean, I. Components of it are. Bits and pieces of it are being automated. Right.
Andrew 38:33
But not. But I don't see you having no drivers in trucks anytime.
Helena 38:39
Well, it's the point to point nature of driving. It's not just the driving, it's the unloading. Right. It's troubleshooting, I guess. It's not. Driving is not the sole task of a driver.
Andrew 38:50
No, yeah, there's definitely all that, but there's also those elements of judgment. Around. What? You know what. What? Something you can drive through. And what's something you can't?
Andrew 39:04
Those are not. It turns out those are quite difficult problems to solve. With sensors like, it turns out we're quite sophisticated. Machines ourselves at doing that.
Helena 39:15
Well, that's a relief. There's this one amazing podcast I listen to called hard fork, and they talk a lot about autonomous driving in the US. So some of the ride hailing services and some of the car manufacturers and the pilots. And my favourite part about the journey to autonomous vehicles has been the completely bonkers way in which humans have reacted to this technology. So it's like they didn't realize that they would have to account for people jumping in front of them to see if they stopped, who'd have sunk it. They didn't realize that they had to build the technology to cope with someone leaving the door open. And then this other kind of more recent, bizarre phenomenon of the thing breaks if you put a traffic cone on the bonnet of the car.
Helena 39:59
And then sort of activists who are anti autonomous vehicles putting cones on these things so that they break. And human interaction, I think, or I don't know, our immune system as it relates to some of these technologies has been the most fascinating part of our journey to automation. I fundamentally think it will happen. But I agree there's a lot more than just automating the driving to account for.
Andrew 40:26
Yeah. And I think it's really what it shows is that white collar workers who are doing this automating have been making value judgments about the complexity of work. There was this sociologist called Kustere who spent, I think it was three days interviewing a machine operator about what that person required to do their job. And still felt like they hadn't captured all of the nuances of the work. So there's white collar workers who have been, whose entire education has been in kind of abstract academic environments, who never, who have never stepped into a vocational learning environment, who haven't done a job that requires embodied skill. I think those people always underestimate the complexity of that work.
Helena 41:34
Are you willing to stick your neck out and list a couple of occupations that you think are most at risk now based on what you've been seeing lately in terms of tech and advancements?
Andrew 41:46
Yeah. I mean. I think, you know, I've worked in a, in a few, a few really big organizations where I've been involved in the production of marketing materials.
Helena 42:09
Right.
Andrew 42:12
And been continually disappointed with how generic, you know, that marketing content is. And I certainly think that most, a very large amount of marketing, you know, marketing content could be replaced with generative AI and no one would notice. In fact.
Helena 42:36
Arguably, a lot of the content is, I often wonder on LinkedIn if I'm actually talking to an ether these days. So.
Andrew 42:42
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, I think it already has. It already has happened.
Helena 42:46
Synthetic content.
Andrew 42:48
And so the. They've, you know, generative AI has successfully, successfully replicated elements of, I guess what you might call fluency in human creativity. I don't think, I don't think it's captured meaning, but it's, you know, it's captured fluency. And for a long time, a lot of what people have been producing, I think in the sectors that around production content have just been, have, you know, they gave up on meaning quite a long time ago. And so if, you know, if your work is the production of any kind of written or graphic content and doesn't include much original, you know, truly original thought. Or even if it does include original thought and your customer doesn't care, then worried, then you're, then you're in trouble, right? I think that's, I don't think it takes a genius to see, to see that.
Andrew 44:02
And then, and this is another classic thing, you know, definitely a lot of higher level, more abstract work in organizations, finance functions is under threat. But what kind of amuses me is that? And this is another classic example of jobs being more complicated than we thought. We still need payroll people. Because everyone thought the payroll was going to be the first thing to be automated in the finance function, but it turns out to be almost impossible to automate because it's just, it's just so, so complicated. Yeah. And there's, there are so many, you know, regulatory, overlapping regulatory requirements that it's actually almost every, you know, every payroll transaction has to be looked at almost individually.
Andrew 45:07
Slight exaggeration. But there's a lot of piecework with payroll, actually. And so we might get it. We might end up in a situation where, you know, the CFO has been automated, but the payroll, everyone.
Helena 45:19
Else hasn't. Do you think we're going to end up with nonsense jobs? I'm going to swear, but I've heard them described as **** jobs. So do you think that we're going to end up kind of automating away and keep nibbling into jobs until there's not much left? And do you think that's going to happen? Do you think it's going to transform jobs or do you think that we're going to end up with kind of really dull jobs? What's your view on that?
Andrew 45:52
Yeah. I don't know. We certainly were. We were talking a bit before about different, more politically driven perspectives on the skills dialogue.
Helena 46:03
Who thought skills could be political? But let's go.
Andrew 46:08
So political. And also because we define ourselves so much by work, they're also so personal.
Helena 46:17
100%. Yeah.
Andrew 46:20
So there was this neo marxist thinker called Braverman. He was writing in the. I'm going to say it was the eighties.
Helena 46:32
Can't say I've come across it, but keep going.
Andrew 46:35
And his viewpoint was that there was a motivation for capital to deskill workers. That was one of the big agendas of capital, was that they would take work that was previously done by a craftsperson and they break it down. And they break it down to the point that it could be automated or turned into a system or turned into a process. And so you see that in manufacturing lines. You see that in call centers.
Helena 47:13
Offshoring BPOs.
Andrew 47:16
Yeah. And what that did is it meant that you need progressively less skilled workers to do work, which means that you've reduced the power of workers and it means you can get workers more cheaply.
Helena 47:30
Kind of like we're seeing now with AI and automation. Right.
Andrew 47:34
Yeah. And, you know, and we've seen in almost every developed economy, real wages have been falling for 15 to 20 years. And so you could argue that that's evidence of, of a trend, like a change in the power dynamic between, between organizations and employees and. And you could certainly say that that work has become more **** over that period. There's also definitely a counter argument that there's been plenty more interesting. There's been a lot of interesting work created as well. But, you know, definitely that in judification of work is a dynamic that's in play.
Helena 48:25
I love that word, insufficient. So maybe let's move to slightly more futuristic topics. What predictions do you have for the next couple of years about how companies need to think about skills? Advice. If you're not comfortable with predictions, what advice do you have?
Andrew 48:51
Yeah, look, I think one of the really major themes is that the increasing dominance of technology in our workplaces doesn't necessarily mean that it's technology skills that are going to be most important.
Helena 49:16
Agreed. Yeah.
Andrew 49:17
In fact, it could be quite the opposite. And it sort of goes back to a few of the conversations we were having earlier, that there will in fact be a, can I call it, a resurgence in the demand for, for people who are good at just being humans at work and people who are able to. To engage in conversations which involve disagreement and conflict. All those kinds of complex interactions may turn out to be the things that actually differentiate organizations. You can see that the hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, anything which can be done at scale, those guys are coming after, and they already have all of their software embedded in all of our organizations.
Helena 50:30
Make it sound quite sinister.
Andrew 50:32
Well, I mean, it's just the way things have always worked. We're all using their technologies in our organizations already. They have an incredibly detailed view of what work looks like in our organizations, and anything which can be addressed at scale, those guys are going after. And so. It's probably futile to go up against the hyperscalers for anything that is. That is doable at scale. Particularly if you're, you know, it's maybe fine if you're a small organization and your goal is to be, to be brought up by those guys.
Andrew 51:14
But if you're a large organization, then that's going to, then your life might get difficult. And so you want to be, I think there probably has to be, you know, what people were talking about in the academic world 20 years ago is the effective term. So I would say to management that, you know, it's probably that long term, if your idea of being an executive is just sitting in an office pulling levers, you know, let's do an Organizational restructure, or let's, you know, let's allocate resources here, then I I'd be actually encouraging people to get out of the office and look at what's actually generating value for their organization. Whether that's on the edge or the middle, there are probably things happening in your organization that you don't understand. And I think it's quite hard, it's actually really hard for executives to go and ask people in their organization what they do, because it's a bit aux, it's a very.
Helena 52:29
Question to be on the receiving end of. 100%.
Andrew 52:33
You're kind of expected to know already. But why would you, because you're permanently trapped in meetings with middle management and external stakeholders. You probably don't know what's happening on the front line of your organization. That, well.
Helena 52:50
This could be words for the HR population listening. Then this message could extend to that population. A.
Andrew 52:59
Yeah, look, I think HR is in a, in really, like, in a really difficult place because they. There's this great description of a particular type of effective work that I read in a paper recently, which is metabolizing effective byproducts.
Helena 53:30
Oh, okay. You're going to need to explain that to me.
Andrew 53:33
So when, you know, often management makes decisions without really considering what the effect is going to be in terms of emotions within organizations, it causes a lot of distress. And then HR somehow has to, like, hoover up that distress and somehow, you know, metabolize it.
Helena 53:56
Yep.
Andrew 53:58
And then, you know, chuck it on the junk pile somehow in a different form. But that requires them, like, they have to, they have to do that emotional work of containing and processing people's distress. And I.
Helena 54:17
Undervalued skill. Then, based on our earlier conversation, that's a really undervalued skill. Potentially.
Andrew 54:23
Very undervalued, very demanding, very hard to get, you know, very likely to generate burnout. And what's the expression I saw recently? Moral harm. And so, you know, HR expected to do that. You know, plus they're also expected to get people paid on time, which we've all, we've already identified as correct, which is also another undervalued skill. And, you know.
Helena 55:00
Also while keeping their workforce engaged, safe, happy.
Andrew 55:07
Yeah. And we haven't even touched on keeping track of all the regulatory changes that are happening where governments are trying to respond to some of these. Destructive practices by business with regulation whilst.
Helena 55:21
Tech is trying to initiate all of our jobs.
Andrew 55:24
Yeah. So I think for HR then to try and get genuinely engaged with what's generating value in the organization at the edge on the front line is really, you know, it's really tough for them but.
Helena 55:44
It'S the opportunity, right?
Andrew 55:46
Yeah. Yeah, maybe.
Helena 55:49
Well, we should probably finish up. I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Even if I haven't understood all of the academic terms that you've brought to the table. Maybe we'll publish. This with a glossary.
Andrew 56:01
I have to apologize for that.
Helena 56:03
You don't have to apologise at all. It's really, it's really educational, it's really nourishing and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Now if people would like to reach out to you, follow you, contact you, how should they reach you? Andrew?
Andrew 56:17
I'll always accept a LinkedIn invitation and then I have my own website@andrewcable.com. Which people can find me at.
Helena 56:27
And that's cable with a cable with a K. Okay, excellent. Thank you so much for your time and for this really engaging conversation, Andrew. I'm sincerely very grateful. Yeah, thank you so much, Helena.
