Giving Compass' Take:

• Caroline Preston shares strategies that schools and companies are using to prepare students for the workforce in spite of schools' inability to keep up with jobs that don't exist yet. 

• How can funders help to scale up these solutions? What resources in your community can be connected to improve education opportunities? 

• Learn about career and technical education. 

We’ve all heard the dire predictions about the coming robot apocalypse. Automation threatens 47 percent of jobs. As many as 800 million people worldwide could be displaced and need to find new jobs by 2030. Middle-class families will be hit the hardest.

Chris Burns has heard these sorts of predictions, too. He’s also seen just how fast changes are happening in his own industry, information technology. Burns works for a business near Cincinnati that sells cloud computing and other technology services, and he says there is a big shortage of skilled IT employees both nationally and in his metro area. His company has started working with local high schools to introduce students and teachers to tech tools and career paths, but he wonders whether it’s enough and what sorts of approaches he ought to be taking given the uncertainty around what jobs will look like in the future.

I asked Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, for his thoughts on this question. Carnevale told me that, first of all, the story of robots creating mass unemployment has been overhyped. To the extent that automation alters people’s work lives, it’ll affect the tasks they do, but few occupations will be completely wiped out. We still need people training to be computer programmers and nurses and engineers — some of those individuals may just have different specialties within their fields in a decade or two.

Schools just aren’t going to be able to keep up with every tech development — companies can’t always keep up — so a lot of the learning will have to take place on the job. Carnevale says that internships are a great way for companies to offer students a chance to get both a taste of a career and pick up new skills. Older workers will also need employers to step in and help them train on new tools.

For his part, Burns told me he suspects that “soft skills” — things like critical thinking, problem solving and communication — are going to be key and that those abilities will serve young people no matter how their jobs evolve with new technologies. The growing importance of soft skills is a topic we’ve written about here at Hechinger. And Carnevale says he shares this perspective.

Read the full article about preparing students for jobs that don't exist by Caroline Preston at The Hechinger Report.