Father Knows Best

These days, I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of work—how AI and automation are changing what skills employers want and need, and how different workers’ lives will be in just a few years. To put some numbers to it, as “traditional jobs with defined responsibilities, pay rate, and location are quickly being replaced by contingent work—shorter  term, often project based, and centered around a skill or area of expertise,”  20 percent of jobs are becoming “non-traditional”—and that stat is soaring toward 50 percent. Last year, Deloitte reported that one in three millennials are expected to leave their current jobs by 2020—and we know from recent trends that they’re part of the same cohort likely to change employers far more often than their older counterparts.

I’ve thought long and hard about how you reconcile seeing unemployed people on the block while headlines scream, “We can’t find the skilled workers we need!” I’ve thought about why some people can move from income source to income source, parlaying their skills into something they can sell, while others struggle with barriers related to their perceived ability and “value-add.” And, really, that “s- word”—skills—is often where my thinking lands. The future workforce isn’t suddenly going to cast out all humans or eradicate the need for empathy, critical thinking, human-centered planning, creativity, or cultural competence. But the future workforce will, I think, eradicate that question, that old bane of etiquette experts everywhere: What do you do? Which is essentially a more oblique way to ask: Who’s your employer?

No, in the future, I’d argue that the more common question will be: What are you good at? Or maybe: What are your skills?

Sure, it sounds a bit clunky, and I concede that you probably won’t pass the green beans during a holiday dinner while saying, “I’m a people person!” I do think, though, that more than before, we’ll see people living the answer: They’ll be flexible across employers; they’ll cobble together income from a few different sources; they’ll be entrepreneurial. And, more than that, they’ll learn and recalibrate their skills on the job throughout their lives to respond to unforeseen changes and opportunities—all of which was recently made clear to me through an unexpected conversation.

***

“Mo, very few people end up earning a living doing what they studied in college.”

To a kid in 1980s Charleston, West Virginia—a place and time dominated by Union Carbide chemists and the teachers, doctors, and professionals who served them—this sentiment, expressed by my dad, seemed highly unlikely. What you studied was what you were. Everywhere I looked I saw people whose college majors became their taglines on their business cards. And being from an admittedly privileged space in my home state, I went to a high school where a majority of my classmates would go on to college, typically to study the very thing their parents did for a living. And for those who didn’t, that was also a declaration of a major of sorts; they would train in a particular vocation, and it would become their label: mechanic, chef, miner.

My dad—pictured below—understood how to make killer Halloween costumes, how to explain my math homework, how to make the world’s best souvlaki. But, at the time, I was convinced that he’d gotten this one thing very, very wrong. Indeed, I believed this for a while, until we were both a little older—until I realized that he’s actually an example of the aforementioned future-proof worker I’d been thinking about. And that he’d been right in front of me for over four decades.

In the early ’70s, my dad was recently married and on the heels of having received a bachelor’s of fine arts from the College of William and Mary; he’d also just spent several years living in caves and deserts in the Mediterranean and the Middle East (don’t worry—his parents rolled their eyes, too). My sister came along in 1973, and they all settled in Austin, Texas, where my dad began work on his master’s degree. But, as life is wont to do, it happened: My grandmother passed suddenly, my grandfather fell ill, and soon my dad headed back to West Virginia, with his new family in tow. The want ads, unsurprisingly, weren’t overflowing with calls for trained sculptors, something my dad had been doing for years. But given that the country was still in the immediate aftermath of a teacher shortage, there were some empty classrooms to fill. That was in 1973. My dad didn’t retire until 43 years later—but he didn’t retire as a teacher. Rather, he retired as a webmaster.

How in the world did he get there?

When my dad joined the West Virginia Library Commission in 1977, silk screen emulsions, paint-splattered jeans, and easels were still significant parts of his day. But as the computer gained popularity, he began using computer-enabled offset printing for the first time. He became deeply interested in computer-enabled design and in computers as tools for librarians. Crucially, he started to explore, all on his own.

Even as young child, I remember my dad as an early adopter: the first guy anyone knew using Adobe,  the guy digitally cataloguing artifacts for local archaeologists before anyone knew what that meant. He came to that interest in the “next new thing” honestly: His father spent his entire adult life working at a phone company, bringing home technology to test with four kids and a band of chihuahua.

By the time I was in college, my dad had been working on website and database design (self-taught) for a few years. The state legislature beckoned—they wanted someone to help integrate computing and web design into bill status tracking, legislative directories, and more. So, in his mid-50s, he took a turn from the creative to tech. But the skills, it seemed, weren’t all that different.

Though the legislature had a distinct set of needs, using the skills he’d gained on the job—critical thinking, social aptitude, adaptability, curiosity, entrepreneurialism—he could be nimble as he experimented to meet these needs. In his own words, “The legislators were like librarians: They needed something bespoke. You had to meet them where they were.” And when he didn’t have the formal training necessary, he looked to the people around him for help.

He learned—by doing, through courses, from peers—different approaches to building databases, from platforms with names like ColdFusion and Oracle (words that likely meant something very different in his former life). He stopped being the guy responsible for laying out the (literal) legislative “facebook” and became the guy responsible for making sure that people five hours away could log in and see the status of legislation that would impact their daily lives.

How did he become a paragon of the skills-building, shape-shifting worker I’d long been looking for?

“Desperation,” he says. “And three kids.”

***

My dad worked until he retired, just days before his 71st birthday. Today, Americans will work as long as he did—longer, actually. And they’ll need to adapt and learn every day to move from one way of earning a living to another, not always pointing back to a decision they made decades ago. In addition, we’ll need to build systems, aid, insurance, safety nets, child-care infrastructure, embedded training at work—all to make sure that they can learn, and earn, every day.

And so, it turns out that my dad was absolutely right: No one ends up making a living truly doing what they studied. They end up making a living doing what they learned.