by Thomas Carey, WINCan and BC Association of Institutes & Universities
and Brian Haugen, Education Director, International Union of Operating Engineers Local 115
Quick Takeaway: Learners in both higher ed and workplaces can develop Job Crafting capability to help shape tasks and roles in jobs of the future.
We hear on a regular basis from our workplace partners that our graduates will need to adapt to Jobs of the Future by working with knowledge that doesn’t yet exist, using knowledge practices and formats that don’t yet exist, in work roles and structures that don’t yet exist. How can we help learners to develop the capabilities needed in order to engage with, make adaptations to and even lead the way on the changes that we can’t yet anticipate?
For example, many of our current employees and new grads from Higher Ed will need to engage effectively with the changes in work practices resulting from impacts of Industry 4.0/Internet of Things developments. And this is just the initial wave of change for a set of phenomena that has been labelled more appropriately as “Industry X.0” [reference 1 at the bottom of this post if you want to research more on your own 😊].
As a European leader in advanced manufacturing expresses it:
“Industry 4.0 isn’t just about smarter machines; it’s also about a workforce with new technical smarts and broader understanding of the big picture of workplace innovation.”
Here’s another example from discussions between our WINCan team and Brian’s organization, the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 115 (British Columbia). The union’s members work in areas such as construction, ports and transportation to operate and maintain large vehicles and other equipment. Technologies such as automated driving systems will disrupt existing tasks and jobs for current employees, but they will also create new tasks in new jobs.
This new interaction modality is known as a ‘driver-more[2] approach – rather than ‘driver-less’ – because it is based on mutual support in perception and in action between the driver and the vehicle. The cooperation aims to exploit and make concrete the complementarity of the human and the automation.
In the future, if the workforce members are going to contribute to the new job designs – either the current workforce or our new graduates – that will require knowledge about the new technologies and also new skills in envisioning, testing and adapting new work designs.
Job Crafting is the label used for this employee participation in work redesign. In addition to Knowledge about the new possibilities for Driver-more approaches and Skills for Job Crafting Skills, the technicians and technologists involve will also need to develop supportive Mindsets. For example, a recent study of Job Crafting in Healthcare concluded that the employees involved had to deal with competing desires regarding the specificity of their new job roles:
“They wanted to remain pioneers while they also wished for more clarity and protection of their role…they felt the desire to develop clear-cut descriptions of what their new job is about so that their carefully carved out place could not easily be disrupted… on the other hand they did not want to over-specify their work in order to position themselves to allow for further development” [3].
How can we as educators provide the Experiences our graduates need to develop capability for Job Crafting in their future workplaces? Here is an example of the research-informed advice being given to organizations around building Job Crafting capability in their workforce:
“Although Job Crafting is bottom-up and individually driven, organizations can support and encourage employees in this behavior. This can be done through the supervisors who motivate employees to craft their jobs, give them the freedom to do so, but also specify what ‘good’ crafting looks like (i.e., the crafting that has positive effects for the employee and the organization).” [4]
By substituting “learner” for “employee”, “teacher” for “supervisor”, etc. in the previous quote, we can infer one path forward for Higher Ed to build Job Crafting capability in our own “workplace for learning”:
Although Job Crafting is bottom-up and individually driven, higher ed institutions can encourage learners to develop this behavior. This can be done through the teachers who motivate learners to craft their learning practices, give them the freedom to do so, but also specify what ‘‘good’’ crafting looks like (i.e., the crafting that has positive effects for the learner and the learning).
(Read Inside Higher Ed and Academica for more on how higher ed institutions can use our “workplaces for learning” to develop graduates who are ready to engage with innovation in their future workplaces.)
Resources
1. Schaeffer, E. (2017). Industry X. 0: Realizing digital value in industrial sectors. Kogan Page Publishers.
2. Castellano, A., Fruttaldo, S., Landini, E., Montanari, R., & Luedtke, A. A “Driver-more” Approach to Vehicle Automation (2018). In 6th Humanist Conference. HUMANIST publications, p. 1. In the same volume see also Heikoop, D. D., Hagenzieker, M., Mecacci, G., Santoni De Sio, F., Calvert, S., Heikoop, D., & van Arem, B. (2018). Meaningful Human Control over Automated Driving Systems.
3. Janssen, M. (2016). Situated Novelty. A study on healthcare innovation and its governance (PhD thesis). Rotterdam: Erasmus University Rotterdam.
4. Demerouti, E. (2014). Design your own job through job crafting. European Psychologist. Vol. 19(4):237–247.