AVEIRO’S LABOUR OBSERVATORY: THE POST-GENERATIONAL WORKFORCE LOOKS BEYOND THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

“If there is any positive outcome from the Covid-19 outbreak, it is surely its impact on relaunching the debate about what kind of economy and society we would like to have”.

This statement by Pedro Roseiro, executive board member tice.pt, opens a recently published e-book “DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION: TECHNOLOGIES AND COMPETENCES FOR THE FUTURE OF WORK AND PROFESSIONS” (http://observatoriodoemprego.web.ua.pt/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/ebook_final_7828.pdf ) curated by the University of Aveiro (UA).

According to the forecasts advanced in the Future of Jobs Report, prepared by the World Economic Forum, by 2022 the emerging jobs of 2018 are set to grow between 16% and 27%, building on the trends of large worldwide companies, while other job roles, that involve technological skills are set to decrease from 31% to 21%.

Overall, 75 million of the current jobs may be replaced due to a profound transformation on the division of work between individuals, systems, equipment and algorithms. On the other hand, 133 millions of new jobs may emerge from this transformation (World Economic Forum, 2018).

The University of Aveiro is partner in the Aveiro STEAM City project and responsible for the implementation of the Labour Observatory (LO), whose mission is to identify the priority areas of qualification necessary for the digital transformation of Aveiro, and to contribute to the development of short-term training offers. 

The scope of the university research team is to give a contribution so that Aveiro continues to build solid foundations to attract and retain the people and talent essential for a sustainable digital transformation. In 2019, the LO held workshops and seminars to collect data and information from institutions in the various economic sectors and is continuing this work now in 2020.

ACTIVITIES

The main activities carried out by the LO are:

1. Research activities, including the data collection and discussion with companies and other local stakeholders, with the purpose of building a valid and updated diagnosis of priorities for qualification to meet the digital transformation in Aveiro.
2. Workshops, on which research activities strongly rely on. Workshops are carried out together with interviews and questionnaires addressing local companies and entities across the target sectors identified in the project (ICT, Industry, Tourism and Services). Workshops and interviews allow the collection of data and the discussion with local stakeholders about the digital transformation challenges that local businesses are facing, in particular, regarding the qualification and requalification of human resources. The results and insights gained in the workshops are the basis to develop innovative and semi-automated tools that will complement the diagnosis exercise.
3. Participation at events, meetings and debates across the domains of technology, industry and services, as well as education and training.
4. Management and development of a pilot Training Program: according to the current execution of the project, these training are now being subcontracted and soon will be launched.  

These activities are continuously disclosed also thorough the Instagram and Facebook channels, via @observatoriodoemprego, and through a periodic newsletter (subscribe by contacting the team at observatoriodoemprego@ua.pt !).

During the latest edition of the Aveiro Tech Week – October 2020 – researchers from the University of Aveiro (UA) presented the development of an innovative Dashboard that integrates and analyzes job offers from different sources of recruitment, thus being an agile way to aggregate information in real time on the dynamics of job offer and competences demand.

So, while the diagnosis and data collection activities, run in year 1 of Aveiro Steam City project, were based on questionnaires administered regularly to companies, this activity is being now complemented with an automated approach (online advertises, job posting, LinkedIn job offers) through the new Dashboard.

The Dashboard extracts info from the web on job offers and, on the skills required in the posts. The dashboard currently captures data coming from the Aveiro Region but it is designed as so it can be easily scaled up.

Experts note that the ongoing coronavirus crisis may further accelerate job polarisation by hollowing out jobs in the middle who seem to be most vulnerable to the uses of technology.

The coronavirus crisis has given new rise to concerns about automation in labour markets, with social distancing measures driving companies and societies to adopt new digital and data-driven technologies. Early predictions that Covid-19 will have a positive automation effect may, however, be overstated. Firms’ automation incentives may be partially offset by the lower aggregate demand in economies following the pandemic disruption, while higher uncertainty and credit constraints hold back their investment decisions. Occupations identified as ‘high-risk’ due to coronavirus exposure and social distancing have also been found to correlate weakly with those facing higher automation risk. Many of the occupations and sectors mostly affected by Covid-19 are typically in the service sector (hospitality, leisure, retail) and are heavily reliant on interpersonal skills, which are less susceptible to replacement by AI technologies (Artificial intelligence in a post-pandemic world of work and skills, CEDEFOP 2020).

Because of Covid-19 most of the companies analysed by the Aveiro LO shifted to remote work and this is not going to change, even when the pandemic will be over, according to UA’s researchers. Of course, the time percentage allocated to smart working could varies, but this “option” will be a permanent change in companies. Hence, specific training on smart working tools would be needed.

In particular, Covid-19 acted as an accelerator for a number of processes: technology adoption, digital transformation, AI’s tools adoption, project management and videocall platforms inclusion among the work routines.

Given these premises, a new scope for the LO is helping companies adapting to the current situation.

This kind of help won’t solve the problem of the economic and financial crisis companies are facing, obviously, but it’s propaedeutic in order to face the transition to new scenarios.

UA’s researchers suggest that in the post pandemic era the type of jobs requested, on the demand-side will be pretty the same to the ones they have identified so far. Though, the concentration will be much more evident on specific sectors. In other words, the competencies requested on the labour market will be the same, but the companies that will hire people will be concentrated in some sectors in particular.

For example, logistics companies will be among those with a boost in demand for highly tech-oriented professions. On the other hand, many people working in the tourism sector will need to be reskilled and probably change sector.

As highlighted in a recently published Deloitte’s report called “Returning to work in the future of work”, organizations have now “an opportunity to push the envelope in the ways they integrate teams of humans and technology. Organizations should evolve their thinking about technology from taking a purely substitution view (replacing humans with technology) to using technology as an augmentation or collaboration strategy. The latter view can allow organizations to not only streamline costs, but to also create value and ultimately, provide meaning to the workforce as a whole”.

The activities run by the LO were impacted by the pandemic only in part; interviews to companies were moved to Zoom, but the research activity went on business as usual. Interviews were closed around the summer break and since September the LO’s team started to work in order to prepare the public call with the aim of finding a provider for the pilot Training Courses, to be developed according to the needs and guidelines identified by UA’s researchers.

To the question: “Considering the activity that the University of Aveiro have and would have carried out in relation to data collection and training on future jobs, what was the added value deriving from the Aveiro Steam City project?” the LO’s team highlighted the huge benefits coming from the collaboration with Inova-ria, an Association of companies that creates today a strong Innovation Network. Inova-Ria was established in 2003 and until today this association has grown and evolved, playing an active role in promoting and creating value especially in the telecommunications sector, particularly through research and development, new technologies dissemination, knowledge and people scouting.

With more than 60 associated members, it was a precious collaboration as the vision coming from Inova-Ria added value to the research team giving many concrete inputs, helping to fill the gap among Academia and Companies.

The collaboration was a sort of peer-to-peer one, and was effective in building mutual trust.

In addition to the value coming from the partnership, researchers recognized a great value coming from the dissemination opportunities and the great visibility of the project, in the Region and beyond. So, they felt that their efforts were not just an internal exercise, as sometimes might happen sadly for some academic activities, but the echo produced was significant and this was consolidated through the relationship with businesses.

This work appears all the more significant now, given the serious context of the labour market crisis already underway, but which experts predict will worsen a lot starting from 2021, when in many European countries the prohibition on dismissals will cease.

So, if during the pandemic employers have experienced accelerations and technological advances that we could define almost "heroic", the real key to recovery will lie in testing the sustainability of these actions and these accelerations. Companies will find themselves having to choose between restoring a vision of yesterday, or building a new vision, marked by sustainability, for tomorrow. In this sense, the Aveiro Labour Observatory will be, among other things, a place for discussion where research can lead to innovative solutions to help the fabric of small and medium-sized enterprises to build this new vision. And, above all, to contribute in the debate in order to help all those groups of workers at risk of dismissal.