Professor Calls for More Investment in Highly Skilled Areas

University of the West Indies (UWI) Professor, Anthony Clayton, says that Jamaica must increase investment in technology and highly skilled areas to ensure the employability of future generations.

He noted that fast-paced advancements in science and technology will make some jobs and professions obsolete. “To a very considerable extent, our future depends on our ability to generate the skills that the market will be looking for,” Professor Clayton stated on (December 1), as he addressed the fourth annual Labour Market Forum at the Planning Institute of Jamaica’s (PIOJ) offices in New Kingston.

Citing the example of the United States (US), he said in 1991, less than half the jobs required skilled labour and “by 2015 that will be up to three quarters of all the jobs in the US requiring relatively advanced skills”.

Among the professions that will be high demand are those in advanced areas such as science, engineering and technology; logistical skills – project aggregators, coordinators, supply chain strategists; thinking skills – problem solvers, policy analysts, business strategist; and entrepreneurial skills.

Professor Clayton, who is the Alcan Professor of Caribbean Sustainable Development at UWI, said that people with networking and social skills will also be “extremely important”.

“We need people, who are good at gathering information. We have talked about how the world will become information rich and you will be in a sea of information, but there is a very rare and important skill, which is making sense of it. People, who have those skills and can disseminate that information are going to be extremely important,” he stated.

He also pointed to the importance of having generic skills, such as fluency in information technology, being able to multitask and network, and having high emotional intelligence to be able to work with people of various backgrounds.

While technological innovations will create jobs in a number of areas, others will become obsolete, especially those in factories and in the craft industry, as people are replaced by faster and more efficient machinery.

Professor Clayton noted further that the popularity and ease of online courses may replace academia; secretaries substituted by software; receptionists replaced by virtual registration; couriers by better e-document security; and government bureaucrats by on-line systems.

He said that the problem for educators is what to teach since the jobs that many students will be doing may not yet exist.

The forum, organised by the PIOJ in collaboration with the Labour Market Information Technical Advisory Committee (LMITAC), was held under the theme: ‘The Future of Work’.

The forum discussed and analysed the global trends relating to technological and scientific innovations and its implications for the nature of work, job content, and the skills that will be required in the Jamaican labour market in the short to medium-term.

Professor Clayton’s presentation focused on research commissioned by HEART Trust/NTA and conducted by Clayton, Wehrmeyer and Bruce (2011) on the ‘Future Labour Market’; along with the strategies that are included under Vision 2030 for the adequate preparation of the labour force.