White Paper

This three-year project, commencing in 2018, aims to investigate the sustainability of the research workforce, with a focus on gender equity, workforce diversity, and early career researcher development; identify skills and knowledge priorities for future research and workforce environments, with a focus on data and digital literacy; and develop a distinctive set of workforce strategies to ensure the sector is best placed to contribute to Australia’s future, enabling effective responses to global opportunities and challenges, and to changing national research and training needs.

The disruptive potential of digital technologies has become a hot topic in recent years. There are calls for governments to add or remove regulations, invest in digital start-ups, and protect the jobs of workers threatened by new ways of doing business. This research paper reviews and interprets expert opinion on disruption in order to inform governments about the policy tasks posed by digital technologies. For the Commission, this review sets a broader framing for the formal inquiries into Data Availability and Use, and Intellectual Property Arrangements. It also provides context for important work that we expect to come to us on productivity growth in a time of apparent digital transformation.

This study looks at the impact of student and migrant employment on opportunities for low skilled people. It improves our understanding of the changing nature of low skilled work, and accounts for the attitudes and motivations of low skilled people and employers in one local economic area: the city of Coventry and the wider Coventry and Warwickshire sub-region. Following a mixed method approach of interviews, focus groups, secondary data analysis and a UK wide literature review, the study presents little evidence to support anecdotal suggestions of students and migrants displacing low skilled people from opportunities in the local labour market. Instead the study highlights the varying job search priorities and techniques employed by different groups of individuals when seeking low skilled work; and explores how far they match those of employers. The research considers the impact of student and migrant employment on three aspects of employability: the ability of lower skilled workers to find employment; to remain in employment, rather than cycling between paid work and unemployment; and to progress within work, for example through engaging in training. It also illustrates the importance of the local economic and demographic context when seeking to promote employment and progression in work amongst low skilled people. In essence, this study represents a valuable contribution to the policy debate around creating a sustainable market for skills that can support economic growth and individual progression for all.

Organizations continued to make healthy investments in employee learning in 2016, finds the Association for Talent Development’s 2017 State of the Industry report, which is sponsored by LinkedIn Learning and Study.com. Organizations spent $1,273 per employee in 2016 on direct learning expenditure, compared with $1,252 in 2015. Confirming organizations’ commitment to learning, the average number of formal learning hours used per employee also grew, reaching 34.1 hours in 2016, up from 33.5 hours in 2015. In fact, this is the fourth year in a row that has seen an increase in both the direct learning expenditure and the number of learning hours per employee.

The purpose of this research is to understand new and emerging skills required in the digital economy, the nature and scope of the skills gaps, various causes of skills gaps, the impact on Canadian businesses, and how they respond. The report therefore: (1) provides a brief overview of the digital economy; how and why technologies are transcending all sectors; (2) defines the new and emerging skills shaping the new economy and outlines the skills necessary to succeed in today's digital economy; (3) explores the 'skills gap' concept in the Canadian context; (4) highlights the strategies to address skill-related trends and challenges; (5) provides case studies to showcase how companies address different aspects of the ever-changing skills landscape of the Canadian labour market; and (6) summarizes the policy responses to overcome skill-related challenges that will help Canadians compete and operate in the digital economy.

This study employed a quantitative approach, supplemented with the results of a qualitative analysis, to comprehensively evaluate the effect of completion of the Helping Youth Pursue Education (HYPE) program with an eye to sharing a “best practice” model with the greater postsecondary sector. The effect of the HYPE program was measured in terms of its impact on completion or current attendance in a college program, persistence beyond the first year of study and academic performance in college

In recent years, there has been a revival of concerns that automation and digitalisation might after all result in a jobless future. The debate has been fuelled by studies for the US and Europe arguing that a substantial share of jobs is at “risk of computerisation”. These studies follow an occupation-based approach proposed by Frey and Osborne (2013), i.e. they assume that whole occupations rather than single job-tasks are automated by technology. As we argue, this might lead to an overestimation of job automatability, as occupations labelled as high-risk occupations often still contain a substantial share of tasks that are hard to automate. Our paper serves two purposes. Firstly, we estimate the job automatability of jobs for 21 OECD countries based on a task-based approach. In contrast to other studies, we take into account the heterogeneity of workers’ tasks within occupations. Overall, we find that, on average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 % of jobs are automatable. The threat from technological advances thus seems much less pronounced compared to the occupation-based approach. We further find heterogeneities across OECD countries. For instance, while the share of automatable jobs is 6 % in Korea, the corresponding share is 12 % in Austria. Differences between countries may reflect general differences in workplace organisation, differences in previous investments into automation technologies as well as differences in the education of workers across countries.

The common assumption today is that robots will soon drive our cars, manage our work, and manufacture our goods. But what is the reality of disruptive innovation in U.S. manufacturing? And how should schools educate skilled labor for this new era? Globally, manufacturing now accounts for approximately 16 percent of GDP and 14 percent of employment. While the industrial workforce in the United States is up from 11.4 million to 12.3 million, employment is still stuck at historical lows (not seen since the 1940s). More troubling still, labor force participation has been declining since 2009. In fact, over the past three decades, the gap between rich and poor has widened—reversing the prior trend toward a growing middle class. Discussions on the future of manufacturing are acutely focused on the threat of automation. To be sure, the U.S. manufacturing sector has undergone a turbulent decade. The United States has lost millions of manufacturing jobs to outsourcing. Interestingly, this dynamic now appears to be changing. Manufacturing is converging (or colliding?) with other industries including software design, virtual and augmented reality, and cloud computing, to name a few.

Appian’s Future of Work survey, conducted by IDG, posed wide-ranging questions to global IT leaders about the state of enterprise IT and its alignment with business in driving transformation. Respondents comprised of 500 senior level IT executives, Director and above, at global companies with over 1000 employees. More than half the respondents were C-level (CIO, CTO, CSO). Survey results are being published in a series of reports that each drill into specific segments of the global data. Key Takeaways: today’s enterprise is all about the customer, and IT needs to get on board; culture and lack of collaboration are biggest transformation barriers; intelligent automation will have the biggest impact in the year ahead.