Creativity and jobs of the future

A recent study by the Oxford Martin School concluded that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at high risk of being taken by smart machines and software in the next two decades. And what is interesting, notes James Manyika, a director of the McKinsey Global Institute and co-author of “No Ordinary Disruption,” is that, contrary to expectations, “knowledge workers at the middle and the top” may be more threatened than those doing physical work. For example, The Associated Press now uses computers, not reporters, to generate more than 3,000 financial reports per quarter. This can free up workers to do more creative work, but they have to be trained for it. Thomas Friedman, May 20, 2015

In my creativity workshops I sometime show the clip of Google's self-driving car being operated by a man who is serverly visually impared and then ask the participants to speculate on what impact this invention may have on the career options of their students. Everybody pretty much guesses that when road vehicles become computer-driven, the prospects for taxi drivers, truck drivers, shuttle drivers, etc. is bleak. But in digging a little deeper, we often speculate about the impact on highway patrol officers, insurance salespeople, and auto body repair technicians. Will there be a rise in transportation engineers, computer programmers, and in-car entertainment specialists?

I introduce the need for developing creativity (the why) in the first chapter of Teaching Outside the Lines (Corwin, 2015):

Right brain skills, the creative class, and Luddites

In his book A Whole New Mind:Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future, Daniel Pink asks the reader if his job can be done better by a machine or less expensively in another country. But the most interesting question he asks is this: “Am I offering something that satisfies the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age?” (Pink, 2006)

In other words, Pink predicts that when one has the money and is given a choice, a consumer will purchase a product that not only works, but has something value-added. An aesthetic appeal, for example. It will be these creative folks, those who use the right sides of their brains, that are less likely to lose their jobs to factory workers in China or to a robot.

Richard Florida writes about the group he calls the “Creative Class.” (Florida, 2003) He estimates that about 30% of the U.S. workforce can be categorized as creatives, divided between the Super Creative Core and Creative Professionals. (Remember these distinctions when we examine Big C and little c definitions of creativity in Chapter Two.) These people and their companies earn enough money that cities attempt to lure as residents - as opposed to trying to have their jobs outsourced them to Bangladesh.

The outsourcing and automating trend is now impacting a new set of workers: those in traditional white collar jobs. New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman thinks Luddites, the 18th century English textile workers who were threatened by automation, got a bad rap. (Krugman, 2012) He writes that “...the workers hurt most were those who had, with effort, acquired valuable skills — only to find those skills suddenly devalued.” Today’s “Luddites” are x-ray technicians, legal researchers, computer programmers, and other skilled occupations. A college degree alone no longer offers a lock on full time, life-long employment at a good salary.

Business gets this. In response to this rapidly and dramatically changing economic landscape, the 2010 IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. (IBM, 2010)

We as conscientious educators cannot ignore these employment trends.  Chapter One: The Rise of Creative Class(room): Why is creativity is no longer a “nice extra” in education?

Like all authors, I suppose, I like getting the royalty checks that arrive in the mail once a year. But the small monies I earn from my writing would simply not be enough of a motivator to write. It's hoping that one's writing convinces others to do a better job with kids that is the real driver. And it's fun to be validated in one's thinking when reading a column like Friedman's mentioned above.