Things Have Never Looked Better … or Have They?

There is no doubt that in many ways digitally enabling technologies and automation have never looked better for business. Automation allows businesses to return labor back to the business to meet other demands, handheld home diagnostic devices take the doctors waiting room out of our lives, GPS allows businesses to deliver, find, or track merchandise and people in a snap. There is no doubt that advanced digital technologies at work are becoming easier and more intuitive to use. They are also increasingly becoming pervasive.

A recent analysis of 43 million job ads done by the National Skills Coalition found that 92% of today’s jobs definitely or likely require digital skills.  Let’s face it: We have been on this journey for at least the last two decades as PCs, the internet, first-generation robotics, radio frequency identification (RFID) and email entered the workplace.

Those pioneering days were littered with cautionary tech tales too. We can all recall the online job application kiosks that proliferated near the checkout lines of retail sites 20 years ago. Suddenly, you saw them strategically positioned everywhere then, just as quickly these harbingers of innovation were covered in dust, then unplugged, moved or repurposed as bins for returned merchandise. Often their last strategic position was by the dumpster.

There are similar costly tales for automation as well. Here, the early adopters were U.S. automakers competing with Japan decades before the internet. Here, too, for many reasons, the adoption trail was slow and littered with massive missteps and related capital expenses. Once operational, robots were not as optimized and turn-key as employers expected. Challenges lead to slowdown or stoppages in production. Robots were then paused, then placed offline, then sometimes moved to the side as legacy manual processes returned.

Can We Learn from The Past?

“Probably not” is what many will say. “That was 20 or more years ago. Technology has evolved so far from that.”  There is a lot of truth in that. The tech — and training — landscape is constantly evolving.  What could we possibly learn from just a few years ago? While the technology has dramatically evolved, the lessons learned from past have a lot to teach us. When we look across the littered trail of legacy tech adoptions there is a critical thread that is often overlooked: People.

In the early 2000s, leaders in fast growing retail discount and dollar chains never asked themselves if the customers they hoped to attract as job seekers could use a computer and complete an online job application at a kiosk. It turns out, most could not. The tech (which surely had its own problems) was too far ahead of the user.

In the 80s and 90s, auto manufacturers made a similar miscalculation in their “lights out” automated production facilities racing to outcompete Japan. (This was referred to as “lights out” because the workers were moved off the floor for robots who don’t need an illuminated workspace.)

Like the retailer’s employment kiosks, manufacturers neglected to figure in the value of their workers brough automation.  For them, the computation toward profit was a subtraction problem: Replacing workers with automation.

In their calculations companies were zeroing out the flexibility, creativity and just-in-time innovation workers brought to automation. They were applying the wrong math problem. It was an addition problem, not subtraction. And the addition brought a multiplier effect. In “A Smarter Strategy for Using Robots,” Ben Armstrong and Julie Shah found that companies have learned that automation strategies find their best outcomes when workers were placed back in the middle of the equation.

So yes, we can learn from the past.

The Engineers Call It a Human Machine Interface for a Reason

They are trying to tell us something. For engineers, the computer screen is called the human machine interface (HMI). They are purposefully keeping the human as the driver of the technology. That’s a clue for leaders of large-scale technology deployments.

The center of the innovation universe is the worker, not the innovation. Calculating people as central to the digitally enabling technology — not separate, apart or absent from it — is the differentiating factor between finding the maximum value of technology versus installing the soon-to-be empty kiosk or decommissioned robot.

While technology and automation are getting smarter, better, cheaper, more reliable and easier to use, the workforce landscape is rapidly changing, too.

Better, cheaper and easier is a recipe for scaling and scaling deeper into positions that have historically required no or few digital skills. Diving deep also means the possibility of getting in over your head with segments of the workforce employers may not know much about.

Digital Acceleration in a Dramatically Shifting Workforce Environment

In the rush to chart a path for increased digital deployment, employers may be making the mistakes of the past and leaving the workers who will actually use new tech investments out of the calculation.

Why? Typically, employers collect less and less information on workers the lower down you go on the wage scale. And as a result, they often know least about the fastest growing segment of their workforce most likely to encounter new technologies: immigrants. While technology is coming fast, many employers lack the insights to determine if the entry and lower-level workforce can effectively use and interact with these big-ticket tech investments. This applies to all tech from handheld assistive devices, digital points of sale, RFID scanners, to large scale automation and smart factory deployments.

There is Not Another Workforce

Deploying tech advanced technology is non-negotiable for growth. Additionally, the workforce will continue to become increasingly language and skill diverse. This is the nexus of focus for employers.

How we choose to move forward is our choice. Calibrating a tech adoption strategy with informed insights into the direct users of that tech is our best insurance against moving forward blindly.

For years the US Census has reported that immigrants will represent all or most of future net workforce growth for the coming decades. Despite this dramatic shift impacting the future of work, employers often know very little about these workers such as education earned outside the US, language ability, and internationally earned credentials.

Employers must learn more about the workers whose jobs we aim to support through technology and also engage and listen to these workers as they build their tech deployment strategies.

Building a Digital Playbook with the Help of a Robot

Building a digital playbook with the worker at the center will get you halfway to building your digital enablement strategy.

Here are a few important strategies to build the digital workforce we least understand.

• Learn from your workers: Collect more information on your front-line workers, especially those who will be engaging with future tech deployments. Ask them what their language skills are, the education they gained in their home countries, and the types of technology they use at home or in other jobs.
• Build your bench: Hire learning and development (L&D) leaders who understand adult learning theory and second language learners. It’s hard to build capacity when you lack bench strength. If you can’t find these experts (or hire them), seek out community partners who are experts such as community colleges, adult education programs and immigrant serving organizations.
• Leverage existing assets: Engage internal or external interpreters and translators. These experts, who can often be found unofficially doing this work, will be critical to building and accommodating other language groups where you aspire to deploy increased technology. Learning English takes time and employers need to tap into talent now. This is not a one-time investment. The U.S. workforce is only getting more diverse.
• Use a robot to help you: While it may seem new, artificial intelligence (AI) will quickly become indispensable in helping you build a strategy to train and support workers from other languages.

AI Won’t Replace You, but a Company That Can Use AI Will

A robot will soon be your favorite work bestie. Chatbots like ChatGPT have unlocked new possibilities for workforce developers.

While this breakthrough is already having a significant impact on code writers, marketers and journalists, it holds great promise supporting the development of training resources for developers who may not fully understand the tech well enough to develop training. Vendor training won’t be enough and be able to calibrate to the languages and unique use case environments of businesses. AI can help.

AI chatbots can support training professionals by supporting the development of training curricula and standard work instructions at more appropriate levels without losing technical integrity. As it rapidly advances, AI will also improve the capabilities of just-in-time translations that can be integrated into automation to improve human-machine interaction. Near future AI models may eventually be so sophisticated in language translation that standard work instructions and HMIs can be quickly calibrated reducing the necessity that workers learn a specific language or translate text into a fixed set of languages. The work remaining for employers at that point will be to effectively train humans to interact with the machines.

Leveraging AI chatbots is quickly changing how we imagine and develop the skills of workers, especially for our fast-growing immigrant workforces where traditional training development was slow and took special expertise.

Support for the Journey Forward

Technology breakthroughs expand what we previously believed to be possible for immigrant workers. The future is exciting, but the question emerges, “Can we keep up?” The Digital Resilience in the American Workforce (DRAW) project, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, is developing technical assistance materials to build the capacity of trainers, educators and workforce developers, to implement strategies that foster the development of digital resilience — the awareness, skills, agility and confidence to be empowered users of new technologies and adapt to changing digital skill demands.

What we’ve learned from the “AI arms race” is that the target for digital skills is constantly moving and as much as companies need digital resilience built into in their systems and approach, workers must also develop the digital resilience to navigate those systems. Programs like DRAW provide educators and trainers with materials that help them understand the scope of digital skills, what it means to be “digitally resilient,” and what they can do in their practice to raise adult learners’ awareness of and confidence to use changing technologies.