November 17, 2001

MANAGEMENT VISIONARY SEES NEW FUTURE OF WORK

Management visionary Peter Drucker has had more opportunity than most to refine his skill at perceiving the shape of the future by comparing his predictions with how matters really turned out. He was, after all, born in 1909.

That's why his outline of ``the next society,'' the coming 20 years or so when ``knowledge workers'' (as he first named them around 1960) come to dominate the economy of developed countries, makes for such interesting reading. It appeared in the Nov. 3 issue of the Economist newsmagazine.

Knowledge workers are people ``whose jobs require formal and advanced schooling.'' That includes not only the people we traditionally think of as professionals -- doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers -- but a growing number of workers, technologists whose job requires specific training.

He cites, for example, medical technologists, who include X-ray technicians, physiotherapists, ultrasound specialists, psychiatric case workers and scores of others. Fifty years ago such jobs scarcely existed, but for the past 30 years they've collectively been the fastest-growing part of the American work force.

The computer industry has its own long list of highly specialized occupations, of course, but so do many old-economy industries.

Drucker's category of knowledge workers is distinct from the customary division of the work force into ``manufacturing'' and ``services'' -- a division which is in any case less clear than it might seem.

``Data-processing employees of a manufacturing firm, such as the Ford Motor Co., are counted as employed in manufacturing,'' Drucker says, ``but when Ford outsources its data-processing, the same people doing exactly the same work are instantly redefined as service workers.''

However manufacturing jobs are defined, they are a decreasing share of the work force and account for a smaller share of the nation's economy -- both now about 15 percent in the United States -- even though manufacturing output has more than doubled since 1960.

Knowledge workers think of themselves as professionals, even when most of what they do at work is more hands-on than lofty cogitation. They might identify more with others who do the same work they do (though in different companies) than with employees of their own company who do different work.

For example, journalists are knowledge workers and typically they are far more likely to move from one newspaper reporting job to another than they are to switch into advertising or marketing. And what the Denver newspapers have done with their joint operating agreement, which outsourced all the business and printing operations to a separate company, is what Drucker expects to happen to companies in general: They will specialize in a particular kind of knowledge.

The growth of knowledge industries converges with the demographic trend toward older populations.

Politicians know perfectly well, Drucker observes, ``that in another 25 years people will have to keep working until their mid-70s, health permitting.''

But they won't necessarily work the same way; more and more people, he believes, will explore part-time work, consulting, temporary work and special assignments once they've reached what once was ``retirement age'' and they have pensions and Social Security. Within 20 or 25 years, ``perhaps as many as half of the people who work for an organization will not be employed by it,'' at least not on a full-time regular basis.

They probably won't want to do the same jobs for decades on end, either. ``A 50-year working life -- unprecedented in human history -- is simply too long for one kind of work,'' he says, though one may note that his own career has lasted far longer than that. Manual workers simply couldn't expect to work that long, because their jobs were too physically demanding, and often damaging to their health.

With more people likely to want training for a second career, ``the fastest-growing industry in any developed country may turn out to be the continuing education of already well-educated adults.''

If knowledge work becomes the mainstay of the economy, should the United States restrict immigration to people who have the education to participate in it? Or will we need to attract immigrants to do less attractive jobs that Americans no longer aspire to?

Drucker doesn't answer that question, but his scenario suggests lots of new questions that need answering.

(701 words)