Looking at statistics is a great way to get instant information. Numbers are facts, and facts are important. So, when we read a statistic, we expect it to lead to some factual conclusion. Unfortunately, especially in the modern age of fake news, memes and social media, it’s very easy and convenient to share a short statistical quote, which then very rarely gets fact-checked by those reading it.
An example of a fact being a fact, and yet not, became apparent to me recently while researching some statistics online. It is a kind of ‘Schrödinger’s fact’, whereby the information is both true and not true at the same time. Did you know, for example, that 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that do not yet exist? I did not know this and found it very interesting, so I decided to do my due diligence and check it out.
I followed the month-old article’s information to its source, the World Economic Forum (WEF) Report on the future of jobs. I found that the report was published in full on their website, and was copyrighted in 2019. It took a lot more digging to find the original publication date, which happened to be 2016. Whilst not completely new, it is still recent enough, and a reputable enough source, for me to take that statistic and run with it. Unfortunately, I am not that trusting, so decided to dig deeper into the footnotes.
I found the statistic being cited and the reference footnote, which was a link to an internet webpage. I clicked on the link and found that the site was disappointingly no longer live. This is no great shock, as the speed at which the internet changes is incredible, and a three-year-old link will often disappear. End of story—I thought.
Again, I am too cynical to give up at this point and just believe something I read on the internet, so got back to digging. A search on the authors of the webpage that no longer exists lead me to a nifty title: ‘shift happens’. A further search for this presented me with a wave of nostalgia, as I saw a video I had not seen for many years. Perhaps you have also seen it if you’re old enough to have been a keen internet user ten years ago. The video in question is a fancy slideshow of statistics put together by two men named Scott McLeod and Karl Fisch. It’s so old that it was using myspace as its barometer for social media popularity. Nevertheless, this is where the information came from about children in the future doing job types that do not exist.
Tenacity overruled complacency again, and I decided to email those original authors. Karl Fisch responded to me the next day, and he said, “While that statistic may indeed have been "sourced" from my presentation, it actually was not in the presentation. I have no idea where it came from. My presentation simply said we were preparing students for jobs that didn't yet exist (based on a quote from former Secretary of Ed Richard Riley).”
Now I was truly hooked. As far as I could tell so far, I had read an interesting fact in a very recent HR article, which upon further scrutiny turned out to be an incorrect statistic being used by a big organisation, the WEF, sourced from a defunct website, based on a ten-year-old presentation, generated from a quote years earlier. At what point do we stop burrowing down the rabbit hole and accept that there is no longer any validity to the information being presented? And, therefore, how do we protect ourselves from using misinformation in our organisations. HR Professionals do not have the time to fact-check any piece of information to this extent, and at some point have to trust their first sources. New policies for talent management, onboarding, career progression, future lines of business and even new technologies could be based on that information, which ultimately turns out to be a huge waste of resources.
I followed Finch’s claim that his source was Richard Riley, former Secretary of Education, and investigated what Riley had originally espoused. A directly attributable quote from Riley was impossible to find, but I found the testimony of Beth Buehlmann, VP and Executive Director, Center for Workforce Preparation, appearing before the Committee on Small Business, 2004, where she said, “Former Secretary of Education Richard Riley recently noted that none of the top ten jobs that will exist in 2010 exist today and that these jobs will employ technology that hasn’t yet been invented to solve problems we haven’t yet imagined.”
That testimony, before the U.S. Congress in 2004 does not cite a source for Riley’s assertion, nor does it tell us when he said it. However, further investigation revealed that Ian Jukes, founder and Executive Director of the InfoSavvy Group, was present at a summit in 2006 where Riley was the keynote speaker and gave the quote again word for word. This obviously comes after the use of his words in the 2004 committee hearing, so he must have been using the phrase for quite a while.
So far, I have still not answered the question of where this quote originally came from. Riley is not a researcher, so when did he start using the quote, and what was his source? Was there even a source to begin with? I was beginning to hit a wall, so started looking for variations on the quote. One such variation, with a very similar sentiment, can be found in the book Women in IT in the New Social Era, by Sonja Bernhardt. She wrote, “Over a decade ago, Herman (1999) predicted, “65% of school-aged students will work in jobs and industries that haven’t been invented yet.” The Herman she seems to be referring to is Alexis Herman, former Secretary of Labor under the Bill Clinton administration.
There are countless other similar variations on quotes predicting the future of the job market, yet none seem to be based on actual research. The quote we are left with today is an amalgamation of bits and pieces other people have referred to over the past few decades. Therefore, the source for the quote itself does not really exist, and yet the quote is here to stay.
Now that we have established that the statistic in question has been completely fabricated, does that mean that it is also completely false? Maybe all these people, together with their experience and insights, stumbled upon a useful truth, despite doing so in a peculiar way.
Unfortunately, it does not appear to be the case. Various outlets have debunked the idea, for example, in 2017 the BBC had a podcast featuring various educators, titled Have 65% of Future Jobs Not Yet Been Invented? Ultimately, they could also find no data to support the claim, and their consensus seems to go against the notion. Researchers for the BBC used employment data to run a comparison and made some strongly biased assumptions to lead them to the desired conclusion. However, even using these assumptions, they said, “Despite our very best effort to inflate the figures, we still only managed to get to one-third of jobs being new.”
Despite the popularity of the idea, and the plethora of influential people sharing it, we are ultimately left with something that sounds interesting but can not be said to be true. It took a long time for me to also reach this conclusion, despite my original intention of finding the source to prove the statistic correct. I started with a natural bias, based on the statistic, that it was probably true. I just wanted to verify it. I ended up debunking it, and am pretty disappointed to do so.
The idea of a brave new world, with new jobs, new technologies, and an exciting future for our children is very appealing. Unfortunately, the truth appears to be far more mundane, and our children will likely be doing most of the same jobs that we are doing today. Therefore, that is what we should be preparing ourselves for. In turn, that is what most companies’ HR management teams should be planning for, as they are likely to be recruiting people into jobs that they are already aware of, and dealing with.
The use of significant resources preparing for change of a magnitude predicted by our false statistic can actually be far more damaging than helpful. It’s a lovely idea that we can plan and prepare for an exciting unknown future, but we would probably be better served by planning to support our future talent in a work practice that already exists. Perhaps preparing for a more inclusive culture, promoting efficiency, and increasing staff wellness would be a better use of those resources. The Shift didn’t happen as much as we thought, and it probably won’t.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
