CONSTANT RETRAINING ESSENTIAL  

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Various government speeches and propaganda stress that today's workforce must retrain, but no one explains why.

Here is an example of required retraining. In 1978 Digital Equipment Corporation of Maryland built the VAX 780 minicomputer. It was one metre high, one metre wide and two metres long and cost $30,000 to manufacture. Six years later the same company came out with a microchip the size of a fingernail that cost $300 and replaced the VAX 780. The highly-skilled, highly-paid workers who produced and serviced the VAX 780 were no longer required. They were obliged to retrain. Since they were in the vanguard of the computer business (they hadn't arrived there from a dairy farm), retraining in the computer industry wasn't too stressful. But for someone coming into computers cold and having worked perhaps only three months on a VAX 780, it was very, very stressful to have to move to another segment of the industry. When airlines flew internal combustion engines w ith propellers, the engine mechanics worked about one hour for every hour of flight time per engine. In the dying days of the prop business, the early 1960s, most airlines were flying four-engine aircraft. So every four-engine airplane that flew eight hours required 32 hours of maintenance. It cost that much for four skilled mechanics, putting in eight hours each on one engine, to keep the whole aircraft fit to fly the next flight.

Then one day the jet engine magically appeared. It flew and flew and flew, and its engines required little maintenance. Because it was almost never "down", it kept flying ... sometimes up to 20 hours a day. Maintenance costs dropped and many highly skilled engine mechanics had to retrain. The same thing has occurred now that fuel injection has replaced carburetor in automobile engines. With fuelinjection, it is easy to simply change the computer card that regulates the fuel-injection and send the defective unit back to the factory where a robot reconditions it. A skilled mechanic is not required to do that. Many auto mechanics spent their days like the Maytag repair man and eventually disappeared.

This has happened before. Remember t he days of the milkman, the elevator operator, the trolley conductor, the street corner newsboy, the laundryman, the caboose car crew and the local butcher? Many of these jobs vanished, so people had to retrain. These changes occurred one at a time and covered decades.

Today change comes with the whirling wind. With a swift-moving small company, one staff member might have 10 jobs in five years. These are not just variations of a job but distinctively different jobs ... because traditional jobs have been vanishing as computers and software replaced manual bookkeeping, dictation, filing, and operating Gestetner duplicating machines and typewriters. Even the switchboard operator that used to came with every fair-sized firm is gone. Telex machines usually had operators who processed everyone's messages, like they had earlier processed cables and telegrams before handing them over to others trained to dispatch them around the country and the world. Now people not only send their own faxes and E-mail, they also compose what they send -- without a secretary. Middle management executives, unfamiliar with many of the new techniques, find out one day that retraining is necessary -- their old jobs disappeared too.

Among environmentalists there is constant cry about the loss of species. But many jobs are vanishing faster than animal or insect species ... because the work environment is changing faster than our surrounding living environment. And this is just the beginning. Every technological change changes some type of job somewhere. It also causes sociological change. The switch from postal service to courier and fax has been reducing daily trips to the post office, facilitating more rapid communication and putting stress on present and former postal workers. They must retrain.

There are currently about 1.5 million unemployed in Canada. Yet there are about 750,000 jobs unfilled, because Canadians aren't trained for them. Some immigrants can get a job immediately, if they have the right skills. In most cases such skills bring salary levels higher than anything a worker can obtain with traditional outdated skills.

Since newly-required skills a re scarce, they command top money, better working conditions and various fringe benefits. Some companies, such as those in computer software, may have to move to a climate or section of the country that appeals to the new in-demand worker. Otherwise business falters. This is the other side of the unemployment picture. Business owners have to change too and maybe even move to somewhere they particularly might not list as their first choice. That move might be across town, to a far away city, or, more likely, across the world. But something else is now happening as rapid change takes place. Since anyone trained for the past only possesses outdated learning, which is of little value in the global marketplace, the basic requirement when hiring a new employee is attitude.

Potential employees (from janitor to president) with the right attitude can rapidly absorb new training. If they have the wrong attitude, hiring them just brings endless headaches. In my seminars around the world I tell companies, "hire on attitude alone. Credentials are from the past and, as we all witness every day, past skills are obsolete." For example, in the new field of virtual reality there are, as yet, no experts, except the few inventors, innovators and developers working on the early prototypes, just now emerging on the global scene. This field will be as big as oil, steel and aviation have been in the past. This new Orville has just made the first flight ... and no one else in the world knows how to do it! Imagine the opportunities?

The only constant is change. Learn to love it. The next big step is into chaos. As the rate of change accelerates, the result will appear as chaotic to the uninitiated. But there is elegant order in chaos. Few so far have learned to recognize it and profit from it. This is where the future lies. Learn to live here and new positions and opportunities never dreamed possible will be yours.

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