The Present is Skills; The Future is Learning

Photo by Steve Buissinne from StockSnap

New Jobs - New Skills

Nothing can highlight the importance of skills more than a pandemic can! During COVID-19, we have had a high demand for "Contact Tracers". These are people who are hired to trace and track the spread of infection by interviewing people. Although contact tracers have been around for decades, COVID has instantly created up to 100,000 new jobs for contact tracers across the United States. As part of New York's contact tracer pilot program, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced in April that he will hire at least 30 contact tracers for every 100,000 individuals in regions across the state. In total, the program is expected to include between 6,400 and 17,000 tracers statewide. Here, in BC, Canada, in just the Vancouver Coastal Health region, a 12-person team of contact tracers that existed before COVID-19 ballooned to more than 270 people. In the UK, the Government is recruiting 25,000 contact tracers to deliver its new test, track and trace strategy. 

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with Bloomberg Philanthropies, launched a free online course “COVID-19 Contact Tracing” on May 11 to help train a large national workforce of contact tracers as some states and cities in US made a move to reopen. 

Gurley, who serves as a lead instructor for the online course given by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, made it clear that in order to take the course, people do not need a background in infectious disease or public health. Infact, she emphasized that the course was designed so that anyone with at least a high school education will be able to follow it.

Skills Versus Degrees

International Health associate Tashrik Ahmed, PhD ’19, is part of the Bloomberg School group who developed the Coursera curriculum that teaches the fundamentals of contact tracing. When asked, "What does it take to be a successful contact tracer?" this was his response:

"You don't need to be a formally trained epidemiologist by any stretch of the imagination. In addition to some basic knowledge of how the disease is transmitted, what is really needed is the ability to understand and put yourself in that person's shoes, to be able to communicate with them and have them open up. 

Active listening is number one. That is the paramount skill for a contact tracer, and curiosity is the second one. You have to be curious, you have to probe. You can't take the answers you're given at face value. Meticulousness is the third key skill. Someone who is very detail-oriented is a huge value to contact tracing.

A best practice is to have a contact tracer that's as close as possible to the community they’re interacting with. If the outbreak is among a Hispanic population, you should get contact tracers from that community. As part of the probing process, the contact tracer needs to understand cultures to ask the right questions. For example, right now is Ramadan. A culturally-aware contact tracer would be more likely to think to ask about iftar and fasting and going to prayer at night. A tracer without an understanding of the community can’t be expected to know that. You get more responsiveness from the people you're talking to if they're dealing with someone who is from their community and understands their context."

Given the above information about the skills needed for contact tracing, what "degree requirement" would one establish for such a job? Isn't it more about the core skills of information gathering, communication and documentation layered with empathy and understanding of cultural context?

Roger Shapiro, a professor of medicine at the Harvard School of Public Health says, "It takes some training, but it's not impossible to train almost anybody with reasonable social skills, who can work off a script, begin a conversation with people, convey a few key messages and collect data."

The Need for Reskilling

A McKinsey study found that 62 per cent of executives believe they’ll “need to retrain or replace more than a quarter of their workforce between now and 2023”. 

This article by McKinsey highlights, how "Even before COVID-19 emerged, the world of stable lifetime employment had faded in the rearview mirror, replaced by the expectation that both executives and employees must continually refresh their skills."

And that, "The pandemic has only heightened the urgency of doubling down on skill building, either to keep up with the speed of transformation now underway or to manage the particulars of working in new ways." 

Move to Skills-Based Hiring

I largely work in the areas of skills and competence development, competence assessment and competency-based Recognition of Prior Learning frameworks. In all these sectors, skills and competencies are the most important currency! In addition, recognition of all types of learning including formal, non formal and informal learning is critical. 

When businesses and organizations view a degree as a blanket qualification for all types of skills - technical and interpersonal - they are often shocked by the lack of real workplace skills. But transforming to skills-based hiring is not simple. Although skills are the currency of the future of work, many organizations haven't adapted their recruitment and talent development strategies to move towards skills-based hiring. Why? It requires significant upfront effort and investment especially around validating existing skills. It requires changes not only at a system level but also at a cultural level. 

To move towards skills-based hiring, we need to ask ourselves key questions like:

• Are all current roles and job descriptions based on skills and competencies? 
• Do we know the existing skills that our employees possess?
• Do the skills and competencies tie back to the business needs? 
• Can we effectively anticipate future skill requirements?
• Do the learning and development efforts help bridge the gaps in these skills and competencies to meet the business needs?

Skills-based hiring and continuous learning can enable organizations and countries to better respond to some of the challenges that we are likely to face in a post-pandemic society. Skills-based hiring can also increase the entry pool and enhance our ability to hire and retain a more diverse talent. This calls for a paradigm shift, not only within organizations but in education and training systems where lifelong learning and adaptability are valued throughout the educational journey. 

A 2016 World Economic Forum report found that “In many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialties did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate.” The increase demand for contact tracers around the world is one such example. So are the new positions related to health and safety administration, such as greeters at malls, offices and construction sites who screen people for COVID symptoms as they arrive. There are many other industries including healthcare, manufacturing and Information Technology including AI and machine learning that are doing well during COVID and are increasingly seeking skilled workers. 

With increased remote work, rise of gig-based economies, digital transformation and automation, the landscape of work has already started to change in a post COVID world. If the only thing that's constant is change, skills are the currency that can help us survive in the present and continuous learning is the mindset that can help us thrive in the future.