L&D 2020: Shaping change in learning
Work & Business
Types of jobs
In 2020 forty-six per cent of the UK workforce is in a professional level occupation1 - up from 30% in 1980 and 41% in 2004.
Some jobs we are less likely to do than we might even twelve years ago in 2008. A job in manufacturing for instance has become more unusual as the sector finally bottoms out reaching its lowest level since the early days of industrialisation. Even though the widespread policy of off-shoring call centres to first India and then South Africa was reversed by many companies in the late 2000s, jobs in UK call centres have still decreased overall as companies downsize their call centre capability as they expand their web-enabled customer services.
The job levels in retail have remained pretty much the same since the 2000s. Despite grim predictions that the fall in prices of goods as production switched to China and the so-called ‘credit crunch would mean major job losses. As we know the retail sector held up well – because demand for goods increased. Jobs in leisure, personal services and care services have also slightly increased – as the country gets richer we can afford to spend on these.
So what are jobs are we more likely to be doing these days? What do these extra professional level jobs actually look like? Despite ministerial forecasts in 20072 that we would all be working in science, innovation and research, our jobs are called, well, pretty much what they would have been back then. The big difference is in the technology we all use to do our jobs. That’s where the real changes have been. We are doing similar things but in a much much more technologically intensive way.
Our on-going training is focussed on making use of each new wave of technology. Take the case of plasterers. Until the mid- 2000s most plaster was mixed up by a labourer in a ‘bath’ or bucket. It was then shovelled onto a board and smoothed onto the surface by hand using a ‘hawk’ and ‘float’. Yes, really it was! Now we take it for granted that the plaster is mixed by machine and sprayed onto the wall where it is smoothed off. A plasterer is still called a plasterer – they just learned to use new the new spraying technology. S/he just takes an hour to do a room that used to take an entire day. The cost of plastering is much cheaper these days. But we don’t have less plasterers. Why? Because it is cheaper, more people want plastering services.
Similar changes in technology in other jobs and sectors have enabled us to compete in global markets more effectively. That’s where the extra higher level jobs have come. So we have more teachers and lecturers but they are teaching non-UK populations. Similarly designers, eco-architects and computer games programmers are doing business for non-UK clients. Unlike in previous generations they do it from the UK using technology.
1. Leitch Review of Skills, Prosperity for all in the global economy - world class skills, 2006
2. Minister for Skills David Lammy, Keynote speech to IES Annual Public Employment Policy Conference, 6 November 2007
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