Skills for the Future

Abstract

The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly unskilled. Every one of the six jobs I entered into in the course of this project required concentration, and most demanded that I master new terms, new tools, and new skills--from placing orders on restaurant computers to wielding the backpack vacuum cleaner. None of these things came as easily to me as I would have liked. --Barbara Ehrenreich (1) AT AGE 57, Barbara Ehrenreich, biology Ph.D. and former New York Times columnist, accepted 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 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 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 hazards from customers whose meals might arrive over- or under-cooked or who are just having 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 Evidence Reated to Future Skills Demands, sponsored by the National Academies, produced some visions of the 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 lot more about what this 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 set of biases about what the jobs that rely on these skills entail: 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 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 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 is a delicate game where the worker must develop skills that can discern 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. …