This blog has written a lot about Singapore in the past, this speech by the country’s Prime Minister sums it up.
For other nations, particularly Australia, it’s time to stay paying attention to how the global economy is changing.
Singapore may not have all the answers and its government’s authoritarian tendencies may work against its ambitions to be a global tech and creative centre, but at least the government is staking a position in the new economy.
It’s been a bad week for the social media service Twitter with its stock pounded after the leak of poorer than expected results.
Writer Matthew Ingham says Twitter lost its way five years ago when it started closing down access to third party developers, a move that hurt the service’s growth and user adoption.
Twitter’s move was greeted with disappointment at the time and many developers gave up working on the company’s APIs.
With the growth of third party applications stunted, there was little reason for new users to come on board and so Twitter is now disappointing the market with its results.
Basically Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and his team reaped what they sowed in restricting access; they kept control of their data but it’s cost them users and hurt their share value.
Twitter’s woes show that the economics of cloud and social media services reward business that share data. While there may be some commercial and legal limits to what information can be shared, the default position should be to make data available.
In an information rich society, those who contribute the most get the rewards. This is the point Twitter’s management missed.
The sudden and unexpected passing of Survey Monkey CEO David Goldberg at age 47 yesterday is a genuine shock.
Last year we interviewed David for Decoding The New Economy and found him to be a gracious and intelligent interviewee – a genuinely nice guy who wasn’t fazed by me constantly confusing Survey Monkey with Mailchimp.
With the passing of David the tech industry has lost one of the smart, good guys. Condolences to the his loved ones.
Yesterday we looked at the PwC report on the value of science and engineering education to the economy.
The survey wasn’t good news for the workforce with the survey predicting over two in five workers’ jobs were at risk as digital technologies changed industry.
Notable in the list were the industries PwC believed to be safe over the next twenty years; largely being the medical, health and ‘people’ businesses like public relations.
While the industries themselves might be safe, specific jobs in those sectors may not be so with roles ranging from hospital porters being replaced by robots to surgeons carrying out remote operations.
Looking at the list of relatively unaffected industries, it’s hard not to see how digital technologies aren’t going to disrupt those occupations.
PR for instance is undergoing a radical change as the media industry is being totally disrupted requiring today’s public relations professionals to have a very different set of skills to those of twenty years ago.
Those skills include a much more adept use of technology itself and having to deal with a faster, more fragmented industry.
Public relations professionals brought up in the days of boozy lunches and far off deadlines struggle in a time of bloggers, social media and data journalism.
Similarly medical practitioners, the top position on the list, have seen their jobs dramatically transformed over the past twenty years by computers and those changes are far from over as medical equipment gets smarter, personal fitness devices become pervasive and the amount of data being collected on patients grows.
Across the medical industry the roles of almost every occupation is being redefined as technology changes the tools they have, along with the nature of ailments their patients present with.
Some professions will grow but automation in those fields will grow exponentially faster, a good example being the fifth role on the list – database administrators and ICT security professionals.
Ensuring the reliability and security of servers and networks is going to become even more essential as the economy increasingly depends upon these systems however security and IT professionals are going to rely on algorithms and Big Data to manage the massive task they have – these are the opportunities for companies like Splunk and Microsoft Dynamics.
In all of these comparatively safe industries the jobs of tomorrow are going to need different skill sets to what they require today.
For workers in these ‘safe industries’ this means further education, training and reskilling to stay employed. Just being employed in a sector that’s expected to stay static or grow isn’t enough to keep your job.
Employers in these ‘safe industries’ also face a challenge in making sure their staff have the right skill sets to use the new technologies.
If you were running an airline in 1965 it would be cold comfort to look at the explosive growth ahead for the industry in the jet airline era when all your staff are trained to keep propellor aircraft in the air.
So when we talk about digital disruption, it’s not just about industries being shut down and jobs being lost but about radically changing occupations.
It would be a brave person to assume that just because their industry is safe, their own job or business is secure.
When discussing how industries are changing, the constant question is ‘what will happen to today’s jobs?’
Even in the Future Proofing Your Business webinar earlier this week this question was asked by a number of the small business owning listeners.
That concern forms the basis of the “A smart move: Future-proofing Australia’s workforce by growing skills in science, technology, engineering and maths” report released by accounting firm PwC yesterday in Sydney.
PwC’s report warns 44 per cent of current Australian jobs are at high risk of being affected by computerisation and technology over the next 20 years.
The report highlights that Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects are critical in the jobs that are going to benefit, or be created, by that technological change.
Sadly for Australia, and most of the western world, STEM courses are deeply out of fashion with students preferring to study in business related courses such as accounting, commerce and law.
As PwC flag, those industries are at risk with accounting at the top of the list for job losses.
On the other hand, PwC forecasts professions in health, education, personal care and – worryingly – public relations will be in increased demand. Something that may underestimate the effects of technology on those industries.
PwC’s main contention is that economies which want to compete in the new economy are going to need more STEM graduates.
The shift to STEM education is something the OECD highlighted in its recent report, OECD report How is the Global Talent Pool Changing?
In their report the organisation forecast that the number of students studying around the world would increase from 130 million today to 300 million by 2030 with all of that growth being in Chinese and Indian STEM courses.
Already that science and engineering emphasis is clear in today’s numbers.
To counter the drift away from STEM courses among students, PwC suggests a campaign to engage young people while they are still at junior school.
Sadly, that’s unlikely to work in Australia given the nation’s economy is built upon property speculation driven by the wealth effect of rising real estate prices.
Two nights before the PwC report one of the highest rating shows on Australian television came to its 2015 finale. The Block, which features couples renovating and flipping properties, finished its season the apartments being sold at auction at record prices and the contestants pocketing between 600 and 800,000 dollars for a few month’s work.
For young Australians the message from their parents and society is clear; don’t innovate, don’t create, just buy as much property as you can afford.
In the US on the other hand, the business heroes are the builders of new enterprises; people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and the founders of Google.
Other countries like Israel, India and China, are aspiring to be the next generation of tech leaders. That’s what’s necessary to build a dynamic economy.
As the PwC report claims, “the jobs most likely to endure over the next couple of decades are ones that require high levels of social intelligence, technical ability and creative intelligence”
Harnessing that combination of social, creative and technical intelligence is going to be one of the challenges for all economies in a decade of change.
Getting the supply of STEM skills right will be essential for success for all countries at a time when digital technologies will drive most industries.