Getting a (digital) trade to fall back on

If you can undertake a ‘digital apprenticeship’ or find around 200 hours to complete an online course, you can walk into a well-paid and reasonably secure job

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

The thing about advising those left behind by globalisation and digitisation to “learn to code” is that it’s as useful as telling them to ‘start conducting brain surgeries’ or ‘master international tax law’. Yes, most people can learn some coding basics, but doing it professionally is another matter.

If learning to code was straightforward, it wouldn’t be the case that the vast majority of software developers were (a) male (b) Asian, Jewish or Caucasian and (c) at the pointy end of the IQ distribution bell curve, especially in relation to mathematical ability. Let me risk cancellation by stating an inconvenient truth – James Damore was entirely correct. Extremely few women and only slightly fewer men have either the desire or aptitude to become coders.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that while only a small sliver of the population has what it takes to become (software) engineers, a far greater proportion of the population can, if they so choose, become (digital) tradespeople.  

It’s not just blue-collar men who end up on the scrapheap
I’m hardly the first person to observe that the way the education system and labour market are set up no longer makes much sense. No later than 18, you’re meant to decide what you want to spend the rest of your life doing. If you aspire to get a reasonably paid, reasonably high-status job, you’re then expected to spend at least three years studying at university. You may well do some sort of professional development training, or perhaps even a postgraduate degree, later in life but you’re basically meant to gulp down a huge amount of knowledge in your late teens and early twenties, then spend the next four or five decades learning anything else you need to know on the job.

Even in a best-case scenario, where you choose the right degree to do and go into a career you find satisfying, you may wake up one day and discover the economy no longer requires your services. A decade ago, I learned this the hard way. At age 40, I abruptly found I was no longer a magazine journalist and almost certainly wouldn’t be able to secure a media job ever again. While I didn’t become a digital tradesman – I’m not sure that was even an option back in 2012 – I did acquire some digital skills that improved my employability. (Or, more accurately, my ‘hireability’ given I decided I was never going to return to wage slavery and thereby put my financial future in somebody else’s hands.)

Of course, it’s not just media types who’ve found themselves at the sharp end of industry disruption in recent times. There are a lot fewer bank tellers and travel agents than there used to be. And there are a whole lot of respectable white-collar workers – academics, accountants, bookkeepers, financial advisers, insurance salesmen, lawyers, market researchers, pharmacists, stock traders and translators – who either are in the process of being replaced with software programs or have good reason to fear they will soon be.

Perhaps because they are reluctant to depress their more affluent readers, listeners and viewers, the media devotes a disproportionate amount of attention to the unlikely prospect of blue-collar jobs such as truck driving being automated away soon while paying almost no attention to the fact many white-collar roles are being automated away right now. You might not see many front-page headlines about it but, trust me, it’s not just minimally educated blue-collar and pink-collar workers who have need to worry about automation. In fact, for the foreseeable future, it’s those who do mental rather than physical labour who have the most to worry about.     

Hitch your wagon to the digital economy’s shooting star
So, long story short, a growing proportion of both the petite and haute bourgeoisie are finding the skill set they spent decades developing is now considered worthless, or close to it, by employers. At the same time, the tech industry that is largely responsible for rendering so many people redundant is desperately in need of talent and presumably will be for the foreseeable future. Once again, I’m hardly the first to observe that it would make sense for those with ‘old economy’ skills to retrain and acquire ‘digital economy’ skills.

This makes perfect sense on paper. But if you’re in your thirties, forties or fifties with responsibilities such as children and a mortgage, it’s not quite that simple. How are you supposed to support yourself and any dependents while retraining? What if you do retrain – either by somehow arranging to study full-time for, say, several months, or slaving away on weekends and in the evenings after work for a year – then find it was all for nothing because you can’t find a tech business to employ or hire you. (Tech companies might be desperate for staff and contractors, but many are not yet quite desperate enough to abandon their unabashedly ageist, tech-bro corporate cultures.)

Fortunately, there are now at least two feasible ways for people to transition from 20th-century jobs to 21st-century ones.

For the last few years, governments and employers have been joining forces to offer what are usually called ‘digital apprenticeships’. While the details vary from scheme to scheme, these digital apprenticeships function similarly to trade apprenticeships, though they are usually much shorter, typically lasting 3,6 or, at most, 12 months.

The digital apprentice spends around half their time working for a tech business – or at least a business in need of technologically skilled staff – and around half their time studying at a vocational educational institute or university. They get paid a modest wage by the business (this wage may be directly or indirectly subsidised by the government) and don’t have to pay anything for their TAFE or uni course. Once the apprenticeship is completed, the erstwhile apprentice has both the book learnin’ and practical experience required to easily find a job. There’s a burgeoning number of these digital apprenticeship schemes available, but still probably not enough to meet demand.

At the recent Jobs and Skills summit, industry, government and unions committed to ramping up the number of ‘digital traineeships’ and building inclusive pathways into tech jobs across the economy.” When I interviewed the Tech Council of Australia’s CEO shortly after the Jobs and Skill Summit, she was particularly excited by this initiative and told me, “Some tech jobs are highly technical and require years of university study in STEM fields. But there are many jobs that can be done by ‘digital tradespeople’. That’s why the Federal Government agreeing to fix vocational training and introduce a digital apprenticeship scheme is such a win.”

But what about all those people who fear they are approaching their use-by date but are unable or unwilling to go down the digital apprenticeship path?

Back in 2017, Google teamed up with online education provider Coursera to start providing the type of qualifications that are catnip to employers desperately looking for digitally skilled workers. Five years on, and Google, with the assistance of Coursera, is now offering ‘Google Professional Certificates’ in Digital Marketing and E-commerce, Data Analytics, IT Support, UX Design and Project Management. As a result, anyone who can find a little bit of money (around $50 a month) and a not insubstantial amount of time (it apparently takes, on average, 190 hours to complete a course) can “prepare for an entry-level job in high growth fields by learning in-demand skills that will take your career to the next level”.

Granted, you don’t get real-world, on-the-job experience, but Google’s brand halo is such that those with a Google Professional Certificate seem to be in high demand with employers. I’m not sure what the situation is outside the US, but over 150 American employers now welcome applications from Google Professional Certificate holders. In 2021, 75% of Google Career Certificate Graduates in the United States reported an improvement in their career trajectory (e.g. new job or career, promotion or raise) within six months of certificate completion.