Tomorrow’s Digitally Enabled Workforce:

Greetings from the Sydney Opera House where Senator Michaelia Cash, Minister for Employment, is launching the report "Tomorrow’s Digitally Enabled Workforce" (Hajkowicz, Reeson, Rudd, Bratanova, Hodgers, Mason and Boughen, 2016). The report does not contain any new insights on the future of work, but is a useful compilation of conventional wisdom: IT will take over many jobs and the workforce needs to be trained for more high-tech and also human focused roles, with continual learning.

The area where the report is weak is in policy implications. After outlining what is going to happen, the report does not really say what we, as a nation, should do about it. As an educator, to me the implications are clear: we need to train people with tech and social skills, but most importantly, people who know about how to learn.

CONTENTS
Foreword 1
Executive summary 7
1    Introduction 17
2     A snapshot of Australia’s labour market today 23
2 1     Employment rates and spare capacity of labour 24
2 2     Youth unemployment 24
2 3    Earnings 25
2 4     Skilled labour – Australia’s competitive advantage 25
2 5     Climate change and employment 25
3     Strategic foresight 26
3 1     Strategic foresight method 26
3 2     Expert interview outcomes 28
4     The megatrends 31
4 1     The second half of the chessboard 31
4 2     Porous boundaries 36
4 3     The era of the entrepreneur 40
4 4     Divergent demographics 44
4 5     The rising bar 49
4 6     Tangible intangibles 53
5     The scenarios 57
5 1     Horizontal axis – extent of institutional change 58
5 2     Vertical axis – extent of task automation 60
5 3     Scenario 1 – Lakes 62
5 4     Scenario 2 – Harbours 63
5 5     Scenario 3 – Rivers 65
5 6     Scenario 4 – Oceans 68
6     Technology and employment 71
6 1    Globalisation 71
6 2    Automation 71
6 3    Augmentation 72
6 4     Distributional impacts 74
6 5     Technology and the firm 75
6 6     Market structure 76
6 7     Jobs of the future 76
7   Policy implications 85
7 1     Digital inclusion 85
7 2     Empowering and informing labour market re-activation 85
7 3     New workforce statistics 86
7 4    Education 87
7 5     Workplace relations 88
7 6     The need for choices 89
8    Conclusion 91
References  94

One problem with the report is that it has been released with a restrictive copyright notice, contrary to Australian Government policy. 

 Reference

Hajkowicz SA, Reeson A, Rudd L, Bratanova A,
Hodgers L, Mason C, Boughen N (2016)
Tomorrow’s Digitally Enabled Workforce:Megatrends and scenarios for jobs andemployment in Australia over the comingtwenty years. CSIRO, Brisbane.