Could a digital co-pilot help reduce our skills shortage?
This week I read an article in the AFR by David Marin-Guzman – The wild card that will shape the Jobs Summit. It was an interesting article and had a lot of insights from our industry leaders, I have to say, great work by those involved! It is based on our skills shortage in the architecture, engineering and construction industry and what the ramifications are to our public infrastructure projects. There is a lot of political approaches in the article, but I thought I’d try and offer a different perspective. A perspective that is from a digital strategist looking at what is going on and thinking how I could help change this for a business I am advising let alone our industry. It’s not an overall answer but I wonder if it is a tool in the toolkit that isn’t being considered enough during these jobs’ shortages. Which is how to manage or reduce the skills fluctuations with digital technologies. Let me take you through what I’ve been thinking.
Impacts to our industry
Skills shortage is a significant issue the industry is currently experiencing. Engineers Australia issued a paper this year that refers to the National Skills Commission definition of skills shortage as “an occupation is considered to be in shortage when employers are unable to fill or have considerable difficulty filling vacancies for an occupation or cannot meet significant specialised skill needs within that occupation, at current levels of remuneration and conditions of employment, and in reasonably accessible locations.” It definitely meets the current issue we are all grappling with doesn’t it?! The worst part is the burden this places on our industry. Not only does skill shortages drive up labour supply costs overall, but the competition for skills is fuelling a propensity to fill positions with a lower-level experience than may otherwise be considered desirable. This can lead to reductions in service and quality and may also impact safety and lead to burnout as lower qualified people perform higher demand roles. Which in return places significantly more stress on business, the industry, and our economy. So how do we balance the skill fluctuations?
Skills fluctuations create an uncertain market. As any strategist will advise, when you are in an uncertain market you nullify or mitigate risks by supporting your decisions with as much market and external environmental information as you can. As we collect information on the construction industry, we can see that the skills fluctuation should be peaking due to the government fiscal strategies on growth through investment. We can also see that once we hit 2025 the skills shortage should reduce as the major public spend on infrastructure projects reduce and it will convert into the operation and maintenance markets. So how could we flip the labour supplier power to ensure we not only keep to our service delivery levels but also reach for higher performance? If we look at industries outside of ours the concentration is commonly on cross-skilling.
Cross-Skilling
Cross-skilling, which is also known as cross-training, is the development of new skills that apply across different functions. The reason many firms look into cross-skilling is to ensure staff have a broader understanding of the needs across the business or across project lifecycles. The other reason is it empowers a business to deal with skills or demand fluctuations, along with ensuring business succession planning is balanced. So how could we use cross-skilling to reduce the impact of the skills shortage on our business?
Cross-skilling today is focused on how we divide up our service offerings. Most businesses in our industry approach the division of services through disciplines and cross-skill within the discipline. Some have a shared-services team in between and use that team as the cross-pollinators. But what if we cross-skilled across our functions? Imagine how dynamic and innovative our industry would be if skills were divided by function rather than discipline? More-so imagine if those functions were streamlined and enabled across digital technologies. Ok…I can feel the eye roll as the digital person refers to their ‘digital hammer’ but hear me out.
If there is one thing I have learnt in implementing digital strategies for the past 20 plus years, it’s that every industry, market, and business follow a very similar framework. In our industry it is the same overarching framework for our disciplines. As an example, a transport modeller uses similar data analyst skills as a water modeller, an urban design modeller etc. So why wouldn’t we cross-skill in the functional direction rather than the discipline direction? If there is one thing COVID has taught us, it’s how interchangeable skills are across industries and markets. So how would an industry then use this ‘functional’ cross-skilling approach with digital.
Changing our Distinctive Digital Skills to Threshold Skills
Digital can be our co-pilot if we use it strategically. Many of the tasks carried out by each of our functions can benefit from levels of automation. When you cross-skill, you find the framework of the functions bubble up to the surface. A data analyst is a great example as their skills have high levels of automation through machine learning algorithms as their co-pilot. As an analyst will know, if we input similar data sources we can find the most successful intersection design, through to the most efficient integrated water design, through to what urban layouts create the highest yield. These are all the same skills but by function not discipline. In return, imagine how much this changes the distinctive and threshold skills needed to compete in our market.
If we think about threshold skills in the accounting industry, originally it was a person who worked with ledgers. This skill set transferred to an administrative level as spreadsheets and databases became the co-pilot. This created a new area for accountants to create new services. The next iteration coming for them is blockchain and the distributed ledger that is automatically defined, which in return creates an entire new market for managing digital assets. For some reason our industry seems to find it the hardest to change. Maybe it is the unionised approaches not looking at the bigger picture. Maybe its business’ fault for not recognising the future and understanding how to transition staff to that next market iteration and just wanting to play in the same space. The biggest concern is we need to look at this now.
Why do we need to look at this now, other than the obvious skills shortage or fluctuation? At the moment, the direction at the macro-economic level is looking at political, economic and legal perspectives which are covered in the AFR article. Secondary to those seem to be the environmental and societal aspects which come up a lot through legislation and standards etc. But, what I’m anxious about is if we don’t cover the technological advancements, we are never going to meet the demand no matter how many more skilled people you bring to the market.
I suppose what I am trying to say is we need to change the distinctive and threshold skills required to compete in our industry. Those skills need to include digital co-pilots for every function so we can mitigate the skills fluctuation risks in the short to medium term. We then need to keep advancing those skills to automate the mundane portions of our work and generate more sustainable models of services. Which as hopefully you can see through this article, they are all possible and achievable.
So what would I, as a digital strategist be asking at the jobs summit? How did we get into the mess that using digital as a co-pilot or automation in general was taking jobs away? How are we going to change that perception for industry about technology so we can meet the market demand? Then how are we going to support industry to lift its digital literacy to reach the necessary demand? Because our skills shortage has more to do with the demand and lack of concentrated innovation on delivery than it does with how many more skilled people we need.
If there are two things I hope this article achieves, it is that those delivering digital strategy consider how cross-skilling can help define your digital drivers as they bubble up to the surface through that process. Then for those concentrating on the larger macro-economic influences, think about how important technological advancement is to society, because our economies of scale have hit the ceiling and those supplier costs in labour only appear to be increasing.