The myth of “skills and skill-sets that will get your somewhere.”

Whose skill-set is it anyway?

There is a huge global myth around skills. Eventually what I state further in this article is the core and real reason why jobs are not to be found. Jobs are going away or whatever it is about jobs.

Let’s capture some ideas around skills, jobs, pay-for-what-you-do, time and materials and more.

Since time immemorial if you did something for someone you get paid. Not in some societies, not in some cultures, not in some circumstances, not in some economies.

What is a skill anyway? It’s a process, procedure, set of steps, list of activity, one after the other things to do. If it’s there it can be automated and is being automated. Now what skill is left for you as a person? Human being? Looking for a job? That cannot and should not be your goal.

What about the skill differences between men and women?

Take a look at the notional value suggested in India for housewives. 92% of women spend 5 hours a day on household chores — work from home is now an exotic word. Compare that with only 29% of men in India spend 30 minutes a day on house work. The counter-argument is that if you put a value — even notional — on the work done at home, it bins the skills more on a woman just be the sheer statistics. Now solve that conundrum?

By the same Oxfam study the unpaid care work done by women at home globally is estimated to be USD 11 trillion. That’s the 3 times the size of the global tech economy.

As someone said in the current pandemic surge globally — the future is biological, not digital. The human aspect is definitely pointing in the direction of the former.

You will never ever have the right skill-sets. With technology doubling every 18 months, the learning curve can never be that fast for even the few. Also, it’s not just one technology, multiple technologies have to be learnt in parallel.

This leads to the next need of everyone having to be a Deep Generalist. Specialization in one skill set will only get you thus far. You have to be a multi-discipline, cross-industry, full-stack, poly-tasking, output generator to just stay in the same place. Even the, the bell-curve will get you within the next 2 or 4 quarters. A year is all that you have, every year.

Even the job and skills of a manager are going away. You got work done, with machines doing that, they can supervise other machines better and they can supervise you as well, while they are about it. So don’t kid yourself on motivational videos, leadership, HR, people management, ops. etc. Your days are numbered in terms of any earning.

Even cash is in doubt. When you are paid in kind. Barter activity. If you think about it even modern digital money is NOT cash. Currency notes are really promissory notes in the first place, where the government guarantees that the paper you hold is worth something.

Digital currency, eWallets and modern digital economies have the digital tokens representing the above promissory notes, themselves and you barter in 1’s and 0’s to the acceptance of everyone else.

For want of any global standard, hedge against acceptance or currency fluctuation, the US dollar emerges as the default cash in even warn torn areas of Africa and the Middle East. Most of the notes floating are fake, counterfeit forgeries anyway, but who knows that.

Even mature currencies and banking systems need multiple checks including UV light, look and feel, touch, serial numbering and more to identify an original promissory note from a counterfeit promissory note.

So why do you need skills? To have food, shelter, clothing. Many modern economies are debating a guaranteed wage. If this was available to every citizen, why work, why have any skills? The best skills you could posses is to able to look after yourself, stay healthy, not bother others, and add to the cost of your community and society. No skills needed anywhere.

Now comes modern economies, automation, computing, services, internet, mobility, Artificial Intelligence and all the 3-letter acronyms in all industries. They are all needed to keep the citizen where he or she is without any skills needed.

The leisure time of people leads to quality of life. Spend time with what you want to do. Family, holidays, entertainment, education (not for skills), information for a life-style of choice. Human behaviour, greed vs fear, friend or foe identification and more will now become full time “mind-share” for the whole population. A completely different set of skills for this. Today it’s called IT security.

To get there you need some skills by some people some of the time.

This comes down to a demand and supply match of a few for the few times its needed for a few people and a few jobs.

Take a plumber, carpenter or electrician. Do you need one? Mostly not. Once a year? You may be a do-it-yourself hobbyist who does most of these yourself. You pay through your nose — your opinion — to find and get one to do the job, once a year each.

The plumber, carpenter or electrician survives because of aggregation. If there are 365 people who need one job each year from each of them, they are good. Unless all these 3 jobs get automated and the big-tech company in California can remotely handled your plumbing, carpentry and electrical work from there. It’s going to happen, it’s happening. So you get the drift no skills needed of any kind, anywhere.

My point is that there are FEW JOBS, with FEW SKILLS for FEW PEOPLE for a FEW amount of TIME. The “gig economy” trend is a definite shift towards this.