Joe Fuller: As technology advances beyond the automation of simple, repetitive tasks, human work is undergoing major changes. That affects professionals as well as blue-collar workers. In the face of automation and computer-augmented work, jobs will increasingly revolve around the skills that distinguish humans from machines--the ability to interact, create, and think critically. Those changes will put a greater premium on reskilling and upskilling. Workers in occupations once insulated from substitution by automation will find themselves displaced in larger numbers. Employers, educators, policy makers, and philanthropists will have to collaborate to create a system that supports those transitions. Companies will also have an important role to play. Deploying new technology may bolster competitiveness initially but it won’t sustain it without companies maintaining the institutional knowledge and personal relationships their current workforces possess. That will require companies investing in their workers to build new skills. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business school. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. I’m joined today by Jamie Merisotis, President and CEO of the Lumina Foundation and author of the new book Human Work. Jamie and I will discuss the skills required for what he describes as the “new human workforce” and the role of employers, colleges, and the social sector in reskilling. We’ll also discuss how the evolution of work might affect society more broadly. Welcome to our podcast, Jamie, and congratulations on your book.

Jamie Merisotis: Great to be with you.

Fuller: Jamie, I know Lumina to be one of the leading forces in the foundation scene in terms of supporting research and activities about school, work, skills development, employability, but could you tell our audience a little bit about Lumina and also how you came to write your new book, Human Work [in the Age of Smart Machines]?

Merisotis: Lumina Foundation is one of the nation's largest private foundations. We're unusual because we're focused on a single issue, which is post-high school learning, and the relationship between learning and work. We want 60 percent of Americans to have a high-quality degree certification, or other credential, by 2025. I've spent my life at this intersection of trying to understand how to better prepare people for work, trying to make it more inclusive. Particularly in the last decade, people have asked me—and us at Lumina—this question more frequently, which is, "So what is education for? Why are we doing all this work that we're doing?" So my book, Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines, is a partial answer to that question, which is that it's to prepare people for the work that only humans can do. And here I spent a lot of time thinking about how work is changing as technology, AI, and automation is taking over more and more of the tasks people used to do. And so what I focused on is, what are machines good at? They're good at repetition and pattern and speed and reducing things to an algorithm, but machines can't understand subtlety, nuance, and particularly how people react to each other in unpredictable ways. So, the book is really about offering a vision in which society can take advantage of the capabilities of the machines, but also understand their limitations and refocus on the human traits and characteristics that allow us to be human workers. We've got to emphasize from an educational perspective, our ability to be ethical and empathetic and our ability to be creative and strong interpersonal communicators and collaborators. So, the main focus of the book is how we prepare people for this virtuous cycle of learning, earning, and serving others that I think is what human work is ultimately all about.

Fuller: One of the big debates that certainly can be heard here at Harvard in the various environs of higher ed is this worry that technology is going to intrude in the economy so quickly as to displace people. But you'll also hear people look at the history of industrial innovation and how every time we anticipated technology would have some devastating impact on employability, all that really happened was the nature of work changed, new jobs got created, and the economy moved forward. How do you feel about this storyline that robots are going to take everyone's work?

Merisotis: Yeah, I don't believe that the robot zombie apocalypse is upon us, so let me start there. I do understand why people are concerned. The speed and pace of change is fundamentally different than what we've seen in the past. Even though there will be destruction, that creative destruction will result in a society where I'm optimistic that we will be able to enhance our human traits and capabilities and actually focus on what really matters to us as humans—and us at Lumina—which is the ability to live a life of meaning and purpose, to find dignity in work, and to be able to contribute to a larger whole. There will be jobs lost, there will be work that is taken over by technology, but I think if we focus on our human traits and capabilities, I think we as human workers will be better off in this age of smart machines.

Fuller: Jamie, in the book you talk about four archetypes or kinds of occupations that you define as being kind of uniquely well-suited to human work. Could you just walk through those four for us and define them?

Merisotis: The helpers are people who are engaged in occupations that involve deep personal interaction with other people. And so this would be things like a therapist or someone who works in customer service. The bridger is someone who works in an occupation that involves more of a connection and intersection between people and technical tasks and systems. So thinking of sales managers, or thinking of people who are working in certain technology fields where they are bridging between the help desk, those kind of people. The integrators are people who work in occupations that involve the integration of knowledge and skills from a range of fields, and then apply them in a really personal way. And in some ways I think this may be the biggest category in the future. These are going to be the people who are the social workers, the teachers. I say it may be the biggest because I think at the end of the day, it is this issue of interaction with other people in a highly personal way that I think is the least likely thing that technology will be able to address in any sort of foreseeable horizon. And then the last one, which is the creators, who work in a way that involves both highly technical skills and what you might call pure creativity. So maybe game developers, or people who are choreographers. You know, I think entertainment is going to grow in this human work era.

Fuller: Let's go back to what you were saying about Lumina's mission to get 60 percent of Americans with that degree or credential that's going to enable them to live an economically safe and sound life, have a decent income level, prospect of household formation—all of the good things we know that extend from that. How do these changes you're anticipating affect your vision of how we're going to cultivate the right type of school-to-work, or school-to-college-to-work pathways?

Merisotis: A lot of that rethinking of learning hasn't focused on these things that are our unique human traits. Machines use these algorithms to dig deeper and deeper into data sets—what the technologists call “deep learning.” Humans do wide learning, right? It's wide in time, wide in people, and wide in content. It's a continuous process; you don't just do it once, it's not a time-limited thing. We know that in fact that racial inequity and injustice has grown, and a big part of that I think needs to be addressed through the learning system. So we have to serve people who are diverse in terms of their race and their ethnicity and gender and immigration status and a host of other factors because human workers have to reflect the totality of the society if we're all going to share in the benefits of their human work. And then the part that sort of goes to my last book, America Needs Talent, is this idea of the content of the learning. You can develop the talent in education, but you can also deploy it by using immigration strategies and some other things. But as we develop the talent, I think that we have to increasingly focus on the idea that we as humans have this innate desire and ability to serve others. And applying those energies and those interests to make the world and our communities a better place, I think, is a very important part of how we need to be thinking about post-high-school learning.

Fuller: One thing that we've seen—of course very well researched—is that the content of jobs has changed. And the things like the broad category of “social skills,” which would include some of the things you define as “people skills” and some of the things you define as “integrative skills” in the book, have really grown over time, that jobs with more social skills are increasing part of the economy, are faster-growing the other categories, pay better than other categories. How do you train for that? How do you educate for that? Certainly, our research is beginning to suggest that the way you get good at doing the jobs that are in high demand is actually to be doing it now. And it's harder and harder to jump over that chasm between “I've finished my studies” and “now I'm going into the workplace” if all I have to rely on are some of the traditional so-called “hard” or technical skills.

Merisotis: It's not a learning phase and a working phase, it's actually using those human traits and capabilities in an integrated fashion in the curriculum. In other words, throughout the curriculum, you should be able to construct an argument using global examples, you should be able to demonstrate that you can work in a team on a project. So, doing it in the educational system and then doing it in work and then doing it in the educational system and doing it in work. I think it is going to be a continuing ongoing cycle, but it's really important to me that we understand that that preparation that we're doing in colleges and universities is an important part of the work, it's a concentrated setting and often a concentrated time period in life, even if you're doing it as an adult. But it's not something that you can just do once.

Fuller: Well, that's certainly the pattern, not just in the United States, but a lot of cultures were young people making that transition from purely academic environment toward careers pass through that social and intellectual experience called “post-secondary education.” And that it's a big determinant, not just of their hard skills, but of their social skills and their integrative skills. Jamie, lifelong learning is a phrase that gets bandied about constantly by policymakers, by philanthropic leaders, educators, and you've mentioned several times it's not a once-and-done model. How can we make that model actually work? Many of the people that we've surveyed who are mid-career learners are they hear that as “You're going back to school.” They don't like the sound of that. A lot of people are happy to have got whatever their final diploma, degree was going to be and leave it at that. Our education system isn't set up to accommodate adults with family and other higher-level social obligations.

Merisotis: We've got this whole category of things where some work requires a specific set of technical knowledge and skills that people should learn in the fastest possible way, and we call that “training,” workforce training. And then there's this other kind of learning that prepares people for life beyond work. And we call that “education.” And some people even say education isn't about work at all, it's like it's pure. But in preparing people for human work, it's obvious that neither training devoid of broader learning nor education devoid of preparation for work is going to give people what they need. The learning should be taking place in lots of different contexts, at work, in learning enterprises, in community-based organizations. The key is for us to continue to develop our competencies, our human traits and capabilities that will make us successful both in work and in life.

Fuller: You talk about working and learning plans so that people actually think of blending those things and not just being a once-and-done phenomenon. Who's responsible for developing those plans? Is that in the lap of the worker? Is that something an employer owns? The policymakers need to be engaging in that?

Merisotis: Well, I think it's yes to all of those things. So, as we think about these plans, let's think about them as integrated serving, learning, and working plans. You can do an internship, you can do an apprenticeship, you can do in-service learning like national service, but you've got to place greater emphasis on integrating these activities, particularly within in the workplace. Because Lumina Foundation is in Indianapolis, we have one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, Eli Lilly and Company. So, I take as an example the marketing team in the diabetes division of a company like Lilly. To truly understand the needs of the doctors and the patients and the benefits of various drug products, I think the people in that team might work for a month or two in a facility that treats diabetes patients. What they would do is they would enhance their empathy and their compassion for the people whose product that they are developing actually serves. So in that way, they are getting a grounding in the work and the impact of the work, and they develop a compassion and understanding for what they're working on isn't just some abstract science or some abstract marketing or whatever part of the product you're working on developing is, it is actually affecting real people. I think it will not only help that worker do their job better, I think it will help the company be more successful, and obviously, I think it will contribute to our shared well-being as a society.

Fuller: When you talk to corporate leaders or business groups with this type of language system and that type of description about what needs to happen, what type of response do you get? Because very often in the history of labor markets, employers have adopted the stance of, “We can't find what we need, the system's broken, somebody better fix it, and that isn’t my job.” Do you find employers are receptive to this message and are beginning to change the way they view their own role in the type of change you're talking about?

Merisotis: I think that many of the jobs that have been lost as a result of the pandemic are unlikely to come back. They are going to change. And this is going to require the employers to change what they're doing. We did some studies several years ago with Accenture around this idea of what are the bottom-line benefits to companies of investing in employee education and training? Many employers see this simply as a sort of cafeteria benefit, but what we were able to demonstrate is that the investment in the employee education and training not only impacted that employee, but it literally impacted the profitability of the company because they spent less money on recruitment and retention, they had higher levels of employee productivity, and the net result was that it improved the bottom line for the company—good employee relations, but it's literally good for business, I think they increasingly see the benefits of doing this.

Fuller: Last year we published some research here at the Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School, and one of the things that it looked at was how employees in many different countries felt about who was responsible for helping them get ready for the future. The country that demonstrated the highest level of individuals feeling that they had to exercise agency over developing skills to be ready for the future was the US. It was well over 60 percent, where there were countries, France, for example, where that same number was closer to 30 percent. What has to happen in the US for people as individuals to make better informed judgments about how to get ready for the future and how work should fit in their broader lives relative to these themes of helping others, moral purpose, all the things you've mentioned earlier?

Merisotis: We've got to come together as a society and use the combination of the actors in the system, the employers, the educators, the policymakers, organizations like mine, philanthropic organizations, as well as the workers themselves, to help solve this. Workers need to know what they know and what they can do clearly enough to be able to describe it to both their current employer and any future employers, and also have that strategic plan we were talking about earlier to build skills. Employers have to embrace the diversity of their employees and their customers and their communities, and provide those opportunities for their workers to develop those plans. I think for people like you and I, the educators, we've got to do a much better job of actually questioning the assumptions behind our current systems. We've got to put the student learner, the learner-worker, at the center of all that we do and focus on the success of the students. And, again, I think taking the issues of racial equity and justice seriously, making sure that we serve adult learners, immigrants, many of the people who are overlooked in the current system. And from my vantage point as the head of a national foundation, we've probably got to do a better job of taking risks—because we have the capacity to take risks that others won't take—and actually, work with government, work with businesses, work with the employers to develop these long-term plans that are going to make a difference.

Fuller: There are many countries that are selectively picked out as having historically strong approaches to what I'll describe as “traditional skills pathways”—the apprenticeship systems and the German-speaking areas of Europe, for example. When you think about human work as you're defining it in the book, are there any countries that you look at and say, "We can learn from them?”

Merisotis: Certainly, countries like the UK have made significant progress in this space of trying to better connect learning and serving and working. Employers invest in these apprentice pools in the UK, as one example. You know, we've seen the Australians do a better job of using their immigration system to actually enhance the workforce skills and opportunities that are inherent in the Australian workforce, we've seen lots of examples from our neighbors in Canada and other countries, but ultimately I don't believe in adopting anyone else's model. I think that we've got to learn from these experiences. But clearly, Americans need to spend more time on understanding what’s working in other parts of the world. That's a message from my last book and that's a message in this book, which is that if we don't immerse ourselves in the details of what's happening in other countries, I think we are going to lose our competitive advantage.

Fuller: Jamie, universities and colleges have always been at the epicenter of the skill system, certainly for some of the types of skills you're talking about. How do you see their role evolving? College has gotten so expensive and seems out of the reach of people, and that some of the economic outcomes for graduates don't seem to justify that investment, and also that they've been very slow to innovate along multiple dimensions. What's the future, as you see it, for higher ed?

Merisotis: We have to come to grips with the fact that we've had such stark leadership failure combined with unfair policies and actions and beliefs that have existed over hundreds of years, right, that have been specifically designed to disadvantage people of color. If a lack of access to this system of post-high-school learning with the right kinds of academic financial and social supports has been part of the problem, we've got to address it in our work. So, that's one issue. The second is we've got to focus on what people know and can do, and make sure that the credentials that they get from us, the degrees, certificates, and certifications actually emphasize those human traits and capabilities we've been talking about—both content and generalizable—again, irrespective of the level of the credentials. And finally, let's make sure the system really is this virtuous cycle of learning, earning, and serving. And let's erode the distinctions among them, let's make sure that we as educators help our learners better connect with the serving and earning parts of the system.

Fuller: Jamie, let me ask you the same question about philanthropy. Lumina has been at the center of this issue certainly during your tenure leading the foundation. It really defined the space, I would argue, as one that's deserving of substantial investment by a major philanthropy. How do you see philanthropy changing in responses to what you're anticipating is going to happen to the evolution of work? And also what about social entrepreneurs who are increasingly active in the sector?

Merisotis: I’ve long resisted the notion that philanthropic organizations like Lumina are simply cash registers with a conscience. I actually think we have certain strategic advantages that we need to leverage in this environment. And I mentioned one of them is to take risks. You know, we have the capacity—and I’d argue, frankly, the responsibility—to take risks that others can’t take. We at Lumina Foundation, we have independent assets, right? We have an endowment. And we’re not directly accountable to voters or shareholders, the way government or public companies might be. I think, frankly, sometimes we hold back on that risk-taking for internally driven reasons. Maybe it’s about board relations or stakeholder reactions or what have you. So we’ve got to take some of that risk that others can’t take in developing this human work ecosystem.

Fuller: Jamie, could you, tell me when you envision risk, could you just talk a little bit more about what you mean? Risk in terms of novel and potentially ultimately unsuccessful designs of training, or is it risks in terms of taking unpopular positions?

Merisotis: Both of those things. One might be that we should actually be helping the learning providers more radically retool their systems because I'm not sure that governments are going to be in a position to be able to do that. These funding models that come from the state and the federal government, they're not well-designed, well-suited, to this idea that you're going to fund the kind of radical innovation that's necessary to rethink the system. The other way is we should be an influencer on broader investment—whether it's corporate investment, private capital markets, or governments—and we should use our expertise and our knowledge to help advance what we know about human work and actually take some of the risks that maybe others might not take. We have to invest in the social entrepreneurs as philanthropic organizations, because again, sometimes the private capital will invest in their work, but oftentimes they are deemed to be too big of a risk. We are an impact investor. We actually make direct equity investments in about 15 different startup companies, because we can take risk and others can't take to help these innovators develop these new kinds of companies that will help serve more diverse populations, create these new learning models, help to provide some of the changes that are needed in this intersection of learning and work. And sometimes from our vantage point, we take the first risk, and it allows other capital to be invested.

Fuller: That type of collaboration could be very productive because I'm doing some research right now on social innovators in this space, social entrepreneurs in this space, who characterize themselves as innovators. And what you often see is they're bringing new energy and new forms of organization to the same old models. We're going to need some catalyst to get some really new insights as to what's going to be required to respond to types of change as you describe in the book.

Merisotis: I think we are faced with a significant need for much more radical change and ramping up. From my vantage point, running a private foundation that focuses on the national level, one of the things maybe we can help do is to coordinate and engage more of these players, bring them together, help them actually collaborate. I think one of the things about entrepreneurship is that you tend to have a fairly narrowly framed idea and you go like heck to try to make your idea successful. We've got to provide some sort of scaffolding to bring these individuals together so that they can actually grow the ideas and scale them at a level that maybe takes longer simply with the sort of traditional J-curve private capital model that we've seen in the past.

Fuller: One of the more provocative parts of the book, Jamie, comes at the end when you talk about how this evolution of the workplace and the types of new requirements are going to emerge really is an issue that we have to think of through the lens of societal values, the enablement of healthy democracies going forward. Could you talk a little bit about your thinking on that?

Merisotis: Part of what I think we are facing—and we certainly have seen an escalation of this in many countries around the world including the US—is this rising interest in authoritarianism. And some people might say, “What’s the relationship between authoritarianism or supporting democracy and human work?” Well, if you think about it, authoritarianism prefers conformity. The idea behind what authoritarians want is they want to stoke fear, fear of change, fear of advantage, fear of the other. And not only is that a threat to liberal democracy and the diversity of ideas and beliefs, it is actually a threat to the way that we tend to interact as humans. So when this authoritarianism spikes, it’s often when people lose opportunity or because they never had it. So again, the rising interest in authoritarianism is not surprising in times of economic crises. And when you add to that the fact that we’ve got these information bubbles—social media and all that—that’s simply been exacerbated. Again, the Covid crisis I think demonstrated that the false information has been appealing to many people with lower levels of education. So there’s a long history of this—something called the World Values Survey—that shows that people who don’t have the sort of higher level of knowledge, skills, and abilities that are associated with these credentials, these degrees, certificates, other things, actually believe that having a “strong leader” is a good thing for their country. A quarter of Americans actually say military rule would be a good way to govern our country, if you ask people who have a high school credential or less. That percentage is dramatically lower for people who have some post-secondary credential. And so, if you think about our learning, our working, and our serving roles as human workers, we’re more likely to vote, to volunteer, to contribute to charity as you move up the credential chain. What I think we all need to do is cultivate all of those critical thinking and ethical decision-making and collaboration and lots of the other democracy-enhancing traits and capabilities in a lot more people. At the end of the day, active citizenship, engaging people in the free expression of ideas, combating threats to our shared desire for freedom and opportunity, is a way that we can make this human work ecosystem happen. Ultimately, human work offers meaning and purpose. It gives people a chance for individual and shared prosperity. That can only happen in democratic context.

Fuller: Jamie, as a last question, you mentioned Covid-19. We're speaking just at the end of the month of November in 2020. What's your sense about how Covid-19 is going to shape or influence our understanding of the evolution of work and how it would might affect the way we respond as a society, for good or ill?

Merisotis: Covid has obviously changed fundamentally the way that we think about work. I think we came to understand now, as a result of what we’ve seen in the Covid environment, that, in fact, essential workers cut across a wide array of things. And so, I think this notion that the essential workers were the people with the higher or highest level of skills has probably been appropriately eroded because of Covid. But at the same time, I think we’ve come to understand that Covid has revealed what we’ve long known, which is that there are differences in people who have the skills that you develop in learning contexts and how successful they can be. So, in this environment of Covid-19, the people who are working at home, twice as many people who work at home, are people who have bachelor’s degrees. In fact, 50 percent of people with bachelor’s degrees or higher have been working from home since the pandemic started. It’s less than 10 percent of those with a high school credential or less. Similarly, we’ve seen the differences in terms of racial difference, right? African-Americans are more likely to work in essential occupations and in fields where the job loss has been highest, like hospitality. African-Americans have also had higher death rates. So Covid has impacted how we think about learning and working and serving others’ human work in some very fundamental ways. And I think that is a permanent change, because at the end of the day, I don’t think people want to go back to normal, because I’m not sure that the normal that they experienced before was very good.

Fuller: Well, Jamie Merisotis, President and CEO of Lumina Foundation, and author of the new book, Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines, thanks for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Merisotis: Wonderful to be with you. Thanks so much.