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Curtis Plott
interviewed by Brian Hecht on November 16, 1995
"We're moving more and more to a contingent workplace."
Curtis Plot is the president of the American Society for Training and Development.
Tripod: How is the workplace that a recent college graduate will face today different from that their parents might have faced 20 years ago?
CP: First of all, jobs as we know it are changing rather dramatically. Take the employment situation, where we have downsized or re-engineered some 15 million jobs out of the workplace over the last 15 years. We're moving more and more to a contingent workplace. We have part-time and also temporary work -- almost 28 percent, that's something like 38 million people, are in jobs like that today, out of 128 million there are working today.
Tripod: So, right away, there's the promise of a less-stable working environment ...
CP: And while we continue to create more jobs than any other economy in the world -- some 2.3 million last year -- about half of those are high-wage, high-skill jobs. And the other half are often lower end, contingent, temporary low-skill jobs that pay less. With that as a backdrop about the availability of jobs, if you're a new entrant into the workforce, the most critical advice I can give anybody is that you need high skills.
"You need better skills, and you need to think differently about what a job might look like in the future."
You need better skills, and you need to think differently about what a job might look like in the future. More and more, these jobs require people who are more adaptable, more flexible, who have a portfolio of skills. You need to think that there's not necessarily a career ladder inside an organization -- that you're going to take a job and work your way up through an organization, and be employed for a long period of time. The social contract in term of permanence of jobs is largely broken. It never was, I think, quite what it was purported to be. So you're looking at what your skill set is, and you're looking at the job market as a market for your skills. People will have to think about this more entrepreneurially. More like an external consultant, even though they might be employed internally. And more as if they're looking to match their skills with what the current demand is in the workforce.
Tripod: Surely there's a big downside to a nation of consultants. I mean, there's a reason that people like to go to work for a company where there's some stability. What's the upside to this world of consultants?
CP: I think whether you're a consultant, or you work inside, this is still a mindset you need to have for the future. Because an orderly progression of jobs inside an organization is still available -- particularly for people with fairly high levels of skill -- but at the same time, it's rapidly changing all the time. You constantly have to look at, "what skills do I have now? Where is work going in our organization?" I think you can never be satisfied with where you are in terms of knowledge, ability, and clearly one of the most crucial elements that employers are looking for today is a real aptitude for work. They know how to come to work, to be on time, to have a work ethic where people are committed to producing the output, because more and more demand is being put on fewer and fewer people.
Tripod: So it's sort of a meta-qualification. It's not so much that you need a particular skill, but you need to be qualified to become qualified.
CP: I think so. The best advice you can give anybody in today's workforce is a good sound basic education, with a mixture of skills. Skills that in the past have been represented by a college degree are more and more in demand. So clearly, finishing college and always focusing on upgrading the quality of the skills you have, and being flexible as to how you think about work may be in the future -- whether it's inside the organization or outside. In either case, the job is kind of an artifact. We created this in the industrial age, but before that, in the agricultural economy, you didn't have to be on time for work. They didn't make these jobs into specialized tasks ... And so what you're seeing now is kind of a breaking-up of that traditional manufacturing approach -- I call it "dumbing down the work," if you will.
Tripod: So in the future, it's going to be less who you work for, or where you work, but what you do ...
CP: What your skills, what your abilities are, and how you can assess how you will find work.
Tripod: What are some of the fields that are more on the cutting edge of new organizational structure, and what are some of the fields that are more conservative?
CP: That's a really good question. There's so much churning going on, it's hard to identify an industry that's standing still. The companies that tend to be much more flexible in terms of their overall approach -- what do they call it -- the "hotel office." Have you heard that term?
Tripod: A hotel office?
CP: You may only be in the office one day a week. So, you have a cabinet and it's on rollers, and when you come into work, you move that into a workspace, you plug into the computer that you have there, you can carry your phone number around so it's always the same no matter where you plug it in. And you do work.
Tripod: So it's kind of a warped variation on telecommuting?
CP: Yeah. Same kind of idea. And you find that very much in the high-tech area. More than anyplace else. They tend to be much more flexible in terms of titles, jobs, and organizational structures.
Tripod: Telecommuting has really become a buzzword. Is it living up to the hype?
CP: Well, most nothing has been living up to the hype in my view. It makes great news, and we tend to overplay it because we try to sell it as an idea. It never moves quite as rapidly.
Tripod: Is there anything good that we're losing by moving to this new paradigm?
CP: The enormous problem we have is this paradox of a rapidly expanding economy, greater profitability in corporations, but we're creating this society of haves and have-nots. A two-tiered society. Where the eighty percent of the households basically have not increased in earning power over the past twenty years. And the top twenty percent have increased dramatically. And it's all related to our high-wage, high-skilled economy ... The downside of this is that with the increased focus on contingent workers, the increased inability of non-college bound people to get into the workforce, where are the consumers? ... Having some equity and equality of opportunity here have been an underpinning of our democratic society. And how do you manage this paradox that we have in the future? I think it's an enormous challenge for us.
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