On Monday, the Royal Bank put out an interesting…well, what was it?  Research Paper?  Discussion Paper?  Idea-concept thingy?…called Humans Wanted: How Canadian Youth Can Thrive in the Age of Disruption.  It’s a bit of a mixed bag as a paper, but ultimately it’s not a bad start to the RBC’s “FutureLaunch” project on youth and skills.

The core of the paper is an examination of jobs and skills in the new economy, their vulnerability to automation and their growth potential using the O*Net database, which provides some quantitative measure of skills for thousands of different occupations.  This isn’t the first Canadian paper to use this method: Matthias Oschinski and Rosalie Wyonch at CD Howe did something similar last year. Not surprisingly, the RBC papers comes to similarly muted conclusions about just how much disruption technological change is going to bring over the next few years (it’s substantial, but by no means historically unprecedented).  Using this database, they divide the Canadian labour force into six clusters (“solvers”, “providers”, “facilitators”, “technicians”, “crafters” and “doers”) which is more than a little Deloitte-ish.  But stripped to its essentials, it tells us that jobs which have higher technical content and require higher levels of judgement (i.e. are non-routine) and years of education tend to be more insulated from automation than those that are not, and hence are likely to see more net job growth in the years to come (having an occupation that mostly falls in the broader public sector doesn’t hurt either). So far so meh: none of this is news, particularly.

Where it gets interesting, though, is its laser-like focus on skills rather than jobs or degrees.  None of the STEM NOW! nonsense you hear so often from outside the academy: it correctly points out that few will ever need coding skills, and science knowledge is important for maybe one in every six jobs.  But what it does instead is talk about the skills/competencies, which are going to be in demand right across the labour market.  And in particular these four:

• Math.
• “Digital” – not well described, but basically, knowing how to use machines and software productively (meaning also an ability to keep up with changes in software)
• “Analytics”, which the report describes mostly in terms of data analysis but which more broadly means, “the ability to draw inferences”, or as I put it back here: “philology”
• The three “c”s – to be communicative, creative, critical and collaborative (I know, that’s four, but for some reason in the intro the three c’s include “creative” but in the text it’s “communication” – not sure why).

And if this all sounds a lot to you like Joseph Aoun in Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, that’s because it is. Which is good, because Aoun is very sensible.  And it’s a big deal that a major Canadian bank is talking sense about skills.

Now, it gets a little less sensible when it comes to some of the actual “findings,” which are not quite based on the actual O*Net research. Many of its recommendations that are phrased as “what ifs”, actually read as “so whats”.  The most interesting of them is its implicit criticism of Canadian business, both for not investing enough in training and in basing too much of their hiring on degrees rather than skills (note: one of the biggest trends to watch for the next decade or so is how employer hiring processes shift in the direction of skills; necessarily this means an increase in testing, which is bound to throw up some fraud and chicanery, but it also has the potential to genuinely diversify hiring and get around the social reproduction problems described by Lauren Rivera in her excellent book Pedigree).

One thing the paper doesn’t do – but which I will – is to draw out the actual implications for post-secondary education.   We all know very well that the most important reason students attend post-secondary is to get better jobs (it’s not the only reason by any means, but it’s the most important).   But how well do institutions actually do in ensuring students actually have these skills?  Colleges are pretty good at the technical skills, but when they get complaints, it’s largely about the kinds of analytic and “three-c” stuff listed here.

And universities?  Don’t get me started.  The standard university response to that list of four items is: “Math?  We have a math department.  Three Cs?  We’re pretty sure that’s what humanities is for.”  Which is, it should go without saying, utterly beside the point.  The point is that every graduate needs to have some grounding in each of those four areas.  And every faculty, every department, should have a plan for making sure that students are able to obtain that grounding at the same time as developing expertise in one disciplinary perspective or another.

We’re getting closer to important consensuses on fields of study (STEM may be not that big a deal), and skills for the modern economy (the four big ones above).  But getting everyone to internalize the latter and integrating them into curricula: we’re still a long ways off.  Helping institutions get there would be a good next step for Royal Bank’s youth project.