Why the Private Sector Must Develop a Socially Responsive Workforce Globalization Policy
The U.S. in general, and U.S. businesses in particular, are understandably preoccupied with the need to reinvigorate business and get American workers back to work. While a lot of attention is focused on ensuring that the jobs created by government stimulus dollars create jobs in America, rather than in other countries, much less thought has been given to another fundamental question:
How many of those jobs that are created in the U.S. will be sustainable, and how many will migrate offshore—pushing newly employed workers back onto the unemployment lines?
With the majority of blue-collar manufacturing jobs already moving offshore, we have been educating our children and retraining displaced workers for knowledge jobs—where people work primarily with information or develop and use knowledge in the regular course of their work. But what happens when these knowledge jobs also go offshore? It is already happening and will inevitability continue to accelerate.
Welcome to the challenges of global knowledge economy (GKE) where businesses are caught between offshoring jobs in order to grow their businesses and maintain profitability while maintaining loyalty to their employees and their communities.
While the private sector may prefer to hunker down with the hope that the PR/political storm of outsourced knowledge jobs will never materialize, or to decide to just ride it out if it does happen, to do so will result in severe longer-term populist and ultimately, governmental repercussions. What must the private sector do in the interim? It must think long and hard about exactly what types of knowledge jobs will be truly sustainable in the U.S. and the skills that will be required for these jobs. It must then create a proactive strategy for preparing current employees for these jobs and for working with schools to ensure that new generations of employees will have the required skills.
Why the Private Sector Must Develop a Socially Responsive Workforce Globalization Policy examines how and why the private sector—particularly large organizations—must begin to proactively identify the requirements of and prepare their own workforces for the global knowledge economy.
Key Points
- Emerging countries are now producing some of the world’s most qualified knowledge workers.
- Companies must globalize knowledge-based processes to remain competitive.
- The globalization of knowledge work has the potential of producing extensive pain in the United States or, it has the potential of generating huge benefits.
- The country is in desperate need of a plan to convert the GKE challenge into opportunity.
- The private sector is best positioned to lead in preparing the U.S. for the new GKE world.
What You Will Learn
- Why U.S. companies are increasingly being forced to look to offshore for foreign-based employees.
- Why our children can no longer count on knowledge jobs as a path to successful careers and higher income in the U.S.
- Why the private sector must start acting now to proactively defuse (at least partially defuse) the GKE time bomb—and simultaneously help educate and enlist the support of some powerful government allies.
- What questions must the private sector answer before it can create the visions, identify the required skills and help design educational curricula for the GKE.