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The steady progression of replacing manual labor with technology received a kick-in-the-seat-of-the-pants by the pandemic. Andy Van Kleunen, CEO of the National Skills Coalition, a policy research group that promotes workforce training, put it this way: “We’ve fast-forwarded 10 years of change in the space of less than 10 months.” According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs survey, forty-three percent of businesses anticipate reducing their workforce because of new technology.
Although the number of new jobs created by new technologies balances or surpasses those lost, the issue is job training, especially given the accelerated pace. Thus far pandemic relief packages have contained no earmarks for training, and it will likely be a difficult fight to create any legislation that does.
