Global Workers Are Ready for Retraining

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joseph Fuller, professor at Harvard Business School, says that the story we hear about workers being afraid for the future of their jobs might not be right. In surveying 11,000 people in lower-income and middle-skills jobs and 6,500 managers across 11 countries, Fuller discovered that, contrary to what bosses believe, many employees are excited about new technologies and willing to be trained in new skills. But they don't always know what they need to learn or how to access and pay for it. Organizations can do a better job of identifying the skills gaps they have or will soon face and using their existing workforces to fill them. Fuller's project is a joint venture between the HBS Project on Managing the Future of Work and the Boston Consulting Group’s Henderson Institute. He's a co-author of the HBR article “Your Workforce is More Adaptable Than You Think."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Looking for a good book? Pick up your next business read during HBR Cyber Monday sale.
0:06.0	Head to store.HBR.org and use promo code cyber23 to save big on HBR books, tools, curated collections and more. That's store.
0:16.6	HBR.org. Happy shopping. Welcome to the HPR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard. What does the workforce of the future look like? How can we adapt to an
0:48.7	increasingly dynamic global economy? How many jobs can we automate?
0:52.9	What new skills will people need?
0:54.7	And what's the plan for getting from here to there?
0:57.8	These are some of the questions that keep business leaders up at night.
1:01.2	Many assume that the employees they currently have, especially those in
1:04.3	lower income middle skills jobs, might not be able to make the transition. They'll need to
1:09.5	be laid off, replaced by technology or younger people. But our guest today says that managers around the world
1:15.0	are underestimating their workers' willingness and ability to learn.
1:19.0	If they instead adopted a more innovative approach to retraining,
1:22.0	it could yield huge benefits.
1:24.0	Joseph Fuller helped conduct a survey of thousands of workers and leaders across 11 countries
1:29.0	in a joint venture between Harvard Business School's Project on Managing the Future of Work and the Boston Consulting Group's Henderson Institute.
1:36.0	He's a professor at HBS and a co-author of the HBR article, Your Workforce is more adaptable than you think. and he's here today to discuss his findings and
1:45.1	recommendations. Joseph, thanks so much for joining us.
1:48.1	My pleasure, Allison. Thanks for having me. So let's first talk about your survey. What kinds of workers and managers did you speak to in all of these countries?
2:07.0	Well, for the managers, we looked at companies of all size, different industries, service manufacturing, export-oriented, strictly domestic,
2:16.4	across eight countries.
2:18.5	For the workers, we looked actually a broader set of countries, 11 countries, and we specifically looked at workers who on average
2:25.6	had left than the median household income in that country, and the population was limited to
	...

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