Ky­ron Reg­is

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers (PwC) T&T has ar­gued that the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has ac­cel­er­at­ed changes in how and where we work, not­ing that for many or­gan­i­sa­tions the cri­sis has brought to the fore the dis­crep­an­cy be­tween the skills peo­ple have and those need­ed for jobs in the dig­i­tal world.

In a state­ment the com­pa­ny not­ed: “Up­skilling the work­force to bridge the dig­i­tal di­vide is a com­plex prob­lem that re­quires busi­ness lead­ers, gov­ern­ments and ed­u­ca­tors to work to­geth­er to make the world a more re­silient, ca­pa­ble and in­clu­sive place.”

Ac­cord­ing to PwC T&T part­ner Zia Pa­ton up­skilling is more than just train­ing, it’s about gain­ing the knowl­edge, skills and ex­pe­ri­ence for new and trans­formed roles, and be­ing equipped to par­tic­i­pate and adapt in our new dig­i­tal world.

Pa­ton re­vealed that this would re­quire pub­lic, pri­vate and so­cial sec­tors to work to­geth­er to equip their teams with the skills they need to suc­ceed.

The re­lease not­ed that Pa­ton is cur­rent­ly lead­ing a team to con­duct Job Eval­u­a­tions across the Civ­il Ser­vice of T&T­—a foun­da­tion­al ex­er­cise to align the com­pen­sa­tion and clas­si­fi­ca­tion of close to 2,000 job po­si­tions in the Civ­il Ser­vice with the re­quire­ments of a mod­ern ser­vice.

Mean­while PwC’s Joint Glob­al Leader, Peo­ple and Or­gan­i­sa­tion, Bhushan Sethi ar­tic­u­lat­ed that or­gan­i­sa­tions need to pre­pare their peo­ple to build back bet­ter and dif­fer­ent­ly. He con­tend­ed that the cre­ation of ‘good jobs’ should be a pri­or­i­ty in this new world.

Sethi said: “The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic con­tin­ues to have dev­as­tat­ing health and eco­nom­ic im­pacts across ge­o­gra­phies and in­dus­tries re­sult­ing in sig­nif­i­cant loss of cur­rent and fu­ture jobs.”

PwC’s Joint Glob­al Leader ac­knowl­edged that COVID-19 has hurt in­dus­tries and liveli­hoods, with mil­lions of jobs lost and many more that could be lost in the af­ter­math. He said that al­most every G20 na­tion is ex­pect­ing re­ces­sion, which would ac­cel­er­ate the dis­place­ment of work­ers.

Sethi con­tin­ued: “Be­fore the pan­dem­ic, while un­em­ploy­ment rates were falling across G20 na­tions, the hol­low­ing out of mid­dle in­come work was start­ing to ring alarm bells.”

Ac­cord­ing to Sethi, many work­ers who were dis­placed by au­toma­tion and new op­er­at­ing mod­els and fac­ing a lack of time and sup­port to ac­quire the skills to piv­ot to­ward oth­er ‘good jobs’, were forced to ac­cept pre­car­i­ous, low­er-skilled, low­er paid jobs.

He added that these jobs dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, are of­ten on the front lines and have greater po­ten­tial ex­po­sure to the virus. The au­dit­ing firm ex­ec­u­tive high­light­ed that jobs will like­ly re­turn as economies re­cov­er, but he note that “the qual­i­ty of those jobs is up to us.”

Sethi com­ment­ed that pol­i­cy­mak­ers should ur­gent­ly fo­cus on: agree­ing on a mea­sure of job qual­i­ty, un­der­stand­ing the ben­e­fits of bet­ter align­ing hu­man work­ers with the val­ue they can de­liv­er; and guid­ing labour mar­ket trans­for­ma­tion as economies sta­bilise post-COVID-19.

Both Pa­ton and Sethi point­ed to two key themes around digi­ti­sa­tion and up­skilling in PwC’s re­cent CEO Pan­el Sur­vey, which in­di­cat­ed that CEOs plan to make their com­pa­nies more dig­i­tal and vir­tu­al, where they would digi­tise core busi­ness op­er­a­tions and process­es, and add dig­i­tal prod­ucts and ser­vices.

The Pan­el Sur­vey al­so un­cov­ered that these CEOs planned to de­vel­op a more flex­i­ble and em­ploy­ee ori­ent­ed work­force, where they would in­crease the share of re­mote or con­tin­gent work­ers, and ex­pand em­ploy­ee health, safe­ty and well­ness pro­grammes.

Sethi re­marked: “It is clear, re­mote col­lab­o­ra­tion and au­toma­tion are here to stay. This means we must ac­cept that in­vest­ment in up­skilling work­ers—so they can piv­ot to ‘good jobs’—is as im­por­tant as in­vest­ing in tech­nol­o­gy and au­toma­tion.”