Roger E. Herman is a strategic business futurist concentrating on workforce and workplace trends. In addition to serving as chief executive officer of The Herman Group, a North Carolina-based management consulting firm, Herman is also the author of 11 books. Among these are: Keeping Good People, How to Become an Employer of Choice, How to Choose Your Next Employer, Signs of the Times and Workforce Stability: Your Competitive Edge.
Herman’s 2003 business bestseller, Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People, contains insights into workforce shortages and their impact on employers and offers advice on how employers must substantially change the way they do business if they are to survive in the future.
Herman is a professional speaker and seminar leader and has been designated a Certified Management Consultant by the Institute of Management Consultants. He is a member of the World Future Society and a contributing editor for workforce and workplace trends for The Futurist Magazine. Herman is a founding member of the Association of Professional Futurists and serves as the senior fellow of The Workforce Stability Institute, a not-for-profit research and education organization.
At the ACTE Convention to be held in December in Las Vegas, Herman will bring his unique insights on what the future holds for us in the workplace and some of the challenges career and technical education will face in meeting those challenges. The following interview is a preview of what promises to be an eye-opening presentation.
As a strategic business futurist, what do you see as the biggest workforce challenge we will face in the future?
The biggest challenge we’re going to face is an unprecedented need for skilled workers. The economy is improving, and there is going to be more of a demand for people who can get the job done because they have the skills, the talent and the attitude to perform.
Even though there is a lot of talk about offshoring, there are going to be plenty of jobs right here in the United States for American companies and for foreign companies that are going to be coming here looking for skilled talent. In a lot of these other countries, they have lots of people, but they don’t necessarily have the people with the skills, background, experience and training they get here in the United States.
The economy is going to be improving to the point that a lot more of these jobs are going to be opening up. There are opportunities out there. There are plenty of jobs out there right now for people coming out of educational environments.
How can career and technical education help to meet that challenge?
There are several things. First there is career guidance to help young people to see the kinds of careers available to them, what kind of preparation will be necessary for various kinds of jobs and how to go about getting that preparation so that as a worker they will have more choices about where they work.
If your education and training is minimal, opportunities will be minimal. If you have strong education and training, you’ll have all kinds of opportunities practically laid at your feet. So the next step would be for career and technical education as a profession to assure that we are providing focused training for these young people—and even retraining for older people who are going to be coming back into the workforce needing to be retrained.
The American Society for Training and Development estimates that 75 percent of our workers today need to be retrained. So we’re looking at not only providing the guidance but also providing the education, as well as helping these people find where they can get the training and education. And that’s going to come from formal educational institutions, commercial providers of education and from the employers themselves.
Part of the process I would suggest is for the career and technical education people to connect enough with the employers so we can look at where the employer-provided component of that training and education fits in with what’s provided by other sources. So essentially we’re becoming advocates for our learners. While many career and technical educators already understand and implement this process, it may be a new concept for others—the idea that you’re not just delivering all of this, but you’re advocating on behalf of each individual that you serve. The third aspect is providing training in life skills. A lot of people get good training in how to run a machine, for instance, but they can’t balance a checkbook. They can do a good job operating a piece of equipment but they can’t help their kids in school or they don’t know how to buy a car. We send people out ready to work and earn a paycheck, but when they get that paycheck they have no idea what to do with it. Some of these life skills are really important and often get ignored in our educational system. How many people coming out of today’s educational process really have this educational ability? We’re looking at an important balance of work skills and life skills for people to be able to perform.
Since you often advise employers on leadership, what lessons in leadership can you offer for career and technical educators?
First is inspiration, which educators might not automatically think of as part of their job. Second is collaboration with employers. One of the things that we encourage leaders to do is cut the red tape and break down the obstacles—remove those things that might get in the way of their followers achieving a high level. The same thing can apply here in not only getting the obstacles out of the way, but in opening paths to communication and opportunity with employers so that students are getting their education and their preparation. They are seeing where they can actually apply this, and the employers are seeing where their future resource is. In many cases, the employers will begin to support that process even more because they can see that they are helping to build their workforce for the future.
The third part is setting and enforcing high standards. We’re expecting young people and those being retrained not to just get by, but to work with high standards and reach their potential, so let’s help them raise the bar so that they continue growing.
What do you mean by the term FutureThink?
Too many people think about today, yesterday, and maybe as far into the future as next week or next year. We need to get people to apply what we call future thinking to look a number of years down the road. So it’s not just what are we going to do in the immediate future, but if we were to look at our schools, our programs, and what our students are doing or will be expected to do in five years, how is that different from where we are today—and what are we doing to get ready for that so that in five years we’re not caught short?
One of the things we need to look at more is a broader perspective on career planning. We have moved away from linear career planning, where you get into a career and you just work your way up within that career. There will still be a lot of that, but there will also be a lot of people who get into what we call a hopscotch career pattern where they will be taking a jump forward or taking a jump back, making a lateral move, or even moving to a different occupation. Part of what we can do is to help them more with both a psychological and a technical readiness to move, so they never become stagnant. Most people become stagnant because they have not acted on the philosophy of lifelong learning. A lot of people who are coming out of education today will hold jobs in five years that don’t even exist today, so they need to be ready. In this regard, we encourage them to learn to think, to learn to learn and to learn to adapt—and to be open to all kinds of new and exciting opportunities. The opportunities will be there.
As we’re looking at counseling people on their careers and their work life—and their non work life—we need to help them see how to look for their whole future pattern and be ready to change that pattern as opportunities arise or as their interests change. The emphasis here would be on life/work balance rather than work/life balance. That’s why we emphasize some of these life skills, so that people can work to live instead of just living to work.
