LISTEN TO THE POST - Employment: Most Significant Paradoxical Challenge of Our Time
In this week’s brew:
Employment: Most Significant Paradoxical Challenge of Our Time by Neelendra Nath
Visual Thought of the Week featuring creative by Janis Ozolins
Money, mindset and growth - a twitter thread by Val Katayev
POST
Employment: The most significant paradoxical challenge of our times
Ability to cooperate at scale is essentially the key that helped humans grow into the civilizational people that we are today. Very broadly speaking, such cooperation for a very large part of the history, fell in just two categories – voluntary or coerced. Coerced being slavery and voluntary, employment.
As the societies became more complex, and requirements for a settled life increased – employment became the form of cooperation which fulfilled practical needs of free people. While in it’s earliest stage employment largely meant physical labour, as the larger cities, industries, mass production, services kicked in, the type and quality of employment varied widely. As an outcome learning and employment, got linked. Since there was a cost - in terms of time and capital - to learning, those who produced better result for that cost, were rewarded higher in their employment. Obviously, employment and prosperity got linked.
Employment, very early in our civilizational history went from being a monetarily rewarding method of cooperation to a marker of prosperity and success.
Role of Employment in Societies
Ability to be employed, and earn your living in many manners have contributed heavily towards making our world peaceful.
The understanding, that a low risk path to prosperity exist curbed the instinctive urge to use force to fulfil desire. As the type of employment changed from mere labour to skill, the urge for learning developed. The fear of loss of employment, or inability to gain one on account of having criminal precedence served as a deterrence.
Learning skill and gaining employment has been, and even today remains the most common method to bring significant single generation shift in prosperity for families.
As a mean for sustenance and path to prosperity, employment very early on became a key demand of people from whatever governance system they were living under. The ability of rulers – monarchs, authoritarians or elected leaders – to generate employment in their land became a sign of fair ruling. People migrated and continue to emigrate to those countries or regions which provided higher and better employment opportunities. The places which showed spurt of growth, offered more employment opportunities and thus attracted better talent who in turn helped in further growing the place. Similarly, lack of employment equated to degrowth, slowdown, exodus of talent and failing economies. A correlation between lack of meaningful employment and crime is also well established.
Availability of employment in many ways has become an essential feature of a balanced, prosperous and thriving society. So, it has become incumbent on governments to ensure that the opportunities remain available for everyone seeking employment.
Why is it a paradoxical challenge in current times?
For most of the government managing employment – availability, renumeration, benefits and employee treatment – has always been a challenge, specially in free markets. For this mode of cooperation to remain effective, it is important that people who seek employment can rely on its availability and the benefits it brings. Availability is often affected by economic cycle, whereas quality and benefits gets affected by micro policies of the organization. So far, those remain the key challenges in the employment space. Government played a role to secure economic environment, and regulate companies employment policies.
Today, we are facing a uniquely challenging situation. On the turn of the century, with technology revolution that gave us internet, global connectivity and high power computing the employment opportunities, skill requirements and benefit terms completely changed. The economic cycle also went through a flux and on the other side of it we saw the most massive shift in skill requirement for meaningful employment.
Today, we face the situation where companies are finding it extremely challenging to hire skilled people and at the same time, skilled people are finding it extremely difficult to find jobs. The supply side, and the demand side both are complaining of unavailability. That is the paradox.
It becomes even more mystifying, when we account for the fact that over time, the regulatory framework guiding employment terms, remuneration and benefits have comparatively improved; as well as, the education participation and throughput of skilled individuals have also globally increased.
There are no simple answers to explain this paradoxical challenge. But at the core of it sits a massive mismatch between academia, employment and aspirations.
We have transitioned in to an era of rapid technology growth and thus the specific knowledge requirement for being employable is rapidly changing. The traditional academia comes out too slow to match the requirements of the industry. Even though as the name of it, the qualification matches the labelled requirements for employment, the skill the said qualification is offering is falling short of what is required to deliver the work. The quality expectations, and specific knowledge requirement for employability has gone up. The standard educational methods have failed to deliver on that.
Also, with then new age technology giants coming in, the understanding of good jobs and job benefits have widely changed. The aspirations of individuals seeking employment have grown muti-folds, which the larger traditional employers are not able to match. Hence, with the environment and benefits that they are offering, they find extremely challenging to get required skilled individuals.
Is there a solution in sight?
Employment and education, were in fact one of the earliest sectors which saw web platforms coming up to cater to. From learning, skilling, upskilling, employment search, sourcing, interviewing, training etc. the whole recruitment and employment management cycle has moved online pretty early in the internet era. Yet, the problem exist.
In the past decade we saw a lot of EdTech solutions come up and grow massively. While much of them helped improved the access situation, they haven’t specifically designed to improve the quality of learning, specially in terms of matching the need of the industry. They have been successful in closing the knowledge gap, but not the skill gap.
We have also seen a surge of skill matching platform, innovating recruitment process solutions come up, claiming to bring the right job to right candidate. But, the problem is supply and demand side not matching. So, these solutions are bringing large numbers of opportunities matching a few candidates or large numbers of candidates matching a few jobs. Doesn’t solve the paradox.
The solution requires to match the pace of rapidly changing nature of jobs, and the way to gain those skills. In past few years, a lot of unconventional ‘educational institutions’ have come up claiming to narrow this skill gap though bootcamp style cohort based skill oriented learning. But they are few and far between, in no way capable of matching the size of the challenge.
The other part of it, the mismatch between offer and aspirations, largely remain unaddressed. It will require an introspection from large legacy companies, some sort of regulatory push and a huge amount of popular demand for change.
Paradoxical challenges are the ones which have exponential upside. If an innovator or entrepreneur, can effectively build to solve this challenge, the opportunity for that business to grow would be enormous.
CURATED
Visual Thought of the Week
Money, Mindset and Growth - Twitter thread by Val Katayev
VALUE ADD
Percolator Talent Collective
Percolator talent collective is a private community I am curating for individuals who are seeking high value high impact technology and growth roles. How it works is that you apply to the collective, and once selected; a curated set of companies reach out to you for the roles they have open.
You can chose to be listed anonymously, or make yourself invisible to a selected set of companies.
If you are in a mental space of ‘not actively seeking but open to see whats out there’, then being part of the collective can actually help you.
Percolator Job Board
If you are actively looking for a job, then we have some really interesting curated remote roles in technology and growth listed on the Percolator Job Board. You can directly apply to them.
Director, Content at Spotify (Remote - Global)
Director, Community Governance at Reddit (Remote - Global)
Senior Product Manager, Growth (SEO) at Reddit (Remote - Global)
Growth Project Manager at Pipe (Remote - Global)
Frontend Engineer at Stripe (Remote - US)
COMMUNITY
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Employment: Most Significant Paradoxical Challenge of Our Time