By 2030, Japan is projected to go from today’s 5.9 persons in the working-age labor pool supporting each retiree, to 1.9 workers per retiree (see Figure 1). In essence, this translates to a three-fold increase of pressure on the workforce just to support the population base at that time. This issue for Japan, according to the United Nations World Population Prospects, the 2010 Revision study, is higher than most but is followed by Europe, and the US. Even China faces an increasing pressure as we approach 2050.
[Note: The population pyramids interactive tool as projected by the UN Study can help you explore details per individual nations and continents. ]
What this creates is a continuing pressure of retirees on the working-age labor force to maintain or grow the economy. Per Figure 2, you can see this projected trend in the percentage of retirees over the rest of the population for some major economies.
Traditionally, we have looked to increasing productivity through innovation and technology to buck this trend, but at some point, the numbers may just be against us. Trying to get a three-fold improvement in worker productivity in less than two decades calls for some significant changes to how we work. Some ideas being proposed include increasing the retirement age, changing immigration policies, improving infrastructure, improving base technology and productivity tools, changing how we teach and add new workers to the pool, and changing the operational processes of organizations and industries. These range from policy decisions to technological innovation to organizational structures.
Figure 2: The Shrinking Retiree-to-Worker Base [Source: Dr. Chieko Asakawa, Dr. Hironobu Takagi, IBM... [+]
This is just the proposition by Dr. Chieko Asakawa, a research Fellow at the IBM Tokyo Research Labs, in their joint work with the national Japan Science and Technology agency. In a presentation at the Coevolution of Future Technologies, Skills, Jobs and Quality of Life conference held at the IBM Almaden Research center in late September, her presentation Exploration of New Workforce Model for Aging Societies was an eye-opener.
The model proposed in this joint effort Senior Cloud Project applies collective intelligence methods to distribute and assist in doing this work. Collective intelligence, if you are not familiar with it, is a collection of business and technological methodologies that apply the aggregate knowledge, insight and expertise of a diverse group of willing participants to a given business problem. It exists in many forms including contests and challenges (e.g., InnoCentive), virtual ideation and dialogue (e.g., IBM Collaboration Jams), or parallel task processing (e.g., Tagasauris, Amazon MTurk).
One goal of this project is to create a mosaic of capabilities of all the participating seniors: a collection of their individual contexts of experience areas and skills, their cognitive ability, their physical ability and other factors such as their language of choice. To understand why we need such data, consider the following ability issue that sometimes affects this population.
Some things that may appear with age such as essential tremors, causing shaking in the hands, can make precise handiwork difficult. These can start at any age but worsen over time to visible shaking—a symptom that people often mistake for Parkinson’s disease, though unrelated. The person is still completely capable of doing the job but such symptoms complicate or slow down the process. This aspect is a physical but not a cognitive ability factor.
Figure 3: Senior Workforce Mosaic creating new Virtual Workers (Source: Dr. Chieko Asakawa, Dr.... [+]
What Senior Cloud proposes is building this mosaic along with a similar mapping of available work items and doing some matchmaking of the two sets. This is one model where micro-work can become reality, assigning tasks as available and skills as necessary to get more work done. One example offered is in remote forestry [Read the related article], pairing the expertise of experience retired forestry experts with young on-site workers. It is goes beyond mentoring, into partnering with others. Another example is pairing seniors of differing abilities together to create the output of single virtual worker (see Figure 3).
The goal here is to look beyond current crisis of employment into the long-term view of what we face. This is one approach to averting some of the projected shortage of future labor in fields like Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). This area of education still does need to be bolstered to draw young people into these fields. However, the demographic shift per this article is a strong concern in nations with almost half of the world’s population, according to the UN.
Collective intelligence projects such as this are showing us new ways of how we can do more with what we have available both within organizations, and across economies. At the same time, they can also create purpose in our lives, improve cross-generational work relationships, and maintain continuity of skills.
These new models of work will likely also face new concepts of what it means to manage such a labor pool as well. [But that, I think, is a story for another time…]
