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Poverty awaits those who do not use tech at work

Updated
The Westway Park Technology Center, a Lone Star College-CyFair satellite, is expected to open in 2018.
The Westway Park Technology Center, a Lone Star College-CyFair satellite, is expected to open in 2018.Lone Star College

How much technology your job requires increasingly determines how much you get paid and whether you will still have a job in the future.

Pundits are worrying about robots putting people out of work, but we too often forget how technology is changing our jobs in much more profound ways. When we think about the jobs of the future, almost all of them will require some skill using digital technology.

Experts call this the digitalization, the adoption of computer technology to change a business or job. That's an important distinction from digitization, which means to transfer something analog into digital format, like scanning an old photograph.

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Whether you are a security guard, construction worker, financial analyst or software engineer, computers are invading your workplace, and hopefully making you more productive, which means we need fewer of you to do the same amount of work. But the more you use technology, the brighter your future, according to new research by Brookings, a Washington-based think tank.

Out of 545 jobs surveyed, representing 90 percent of U.S. workers, 517 jobs saw an increase in digitalization between 2002 and 2016, researchers found. Professional, scientific and technical services; media; and the finance and insurance sectors saw the highest increase in demand for digital skills.

All of this makes sense. Doctors take notes on electronic records, lawyers use computer templates, engineers design on computer screens and accountants plug in the numbers and let the computer do the math. Journalists need digital editing skills more than red pencils and darkrooms.

The percentage of jobs requiring a high level of digital competency has risen from 5 percent in 2002 to 23 percent last year. Jobs requiring little or no digital skills have dropped from 56 percent to 30 percent.

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Workers who remain in low digital skills category, by the way, are also getting paid less, earning on average $30,393 a year. By comparison, workers with high digital skills make $72,896. Low-skill wages are also declining on average 0.2 percent a year, while high-skill jobs are rising 0.8 percent. Middle-skill wages are rising at an annual rate of 0.3 percent.

The trend is clear. If machines are replacing workers, then people who can operate the machines are in high demand. People without digital skills are falling behind.

The effect on non-digitalized workers can be found in the reams of bad news about our economy. Older Americans with few digital skills are losing their jobs, taking addictive drugs and ending their lives with remarkable frequency, lowering life expectancies for the first time in U.S. history.

The growing income inequality between manual and digital laborers is also shrinking the middle class, stratifying society and stunting economic growth. The pain may be most obvious in the Rust Belt and in rural communities, but it is affecting all of us.

The trite answer is to call for better education, and that's not wrong, but it obscures the real solution.

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In Texas, only 38 percent of the workforce has some kind of college degree or professional certificate, and bizarrely, workers over 55 years of age are more likely to have some kind of post-high school education, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Only 20 percent of Texas children who entered the eighth grade in 2006 have managed to earn two-year college degrees in the last decade.

To meet the workforce needs of the future, and to ensure Texas' economic growth and competitiveness, we need more than the annual cry for better schools. We need a comprehensive overhaul of how we fund schools, compensate our teachers and educate our children.

For example, instead of carrying a book bag, all students from elementary school forward need tablets or laptop computers on which to do most of their learning. Every home needs access to the internet, so students have access to the world's best resources to complete their homework.

Teachers need digital skills that they can pass on to students, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math. And knowledge of a computer language is just as important as learning a foreign language, if for no other reason than to help young people understand the machines they use.

Employers must also get involved from nursery school to adult education to make sure that public schools, universities and continuing adult education curricula provide up-to-date and relevant training so that we close the gap between the skills that students learn and those that companies need.

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The problem, of course, is that none of this comes cheap, which is why demanding better schools is not enough. What we need is more money to make sure every student, no matter the neighborhood, can access digital equipment and the education to use it.

Slashing teacher salaries, targeting imagined waste, decrying tougher coursework and rejecting access to technology as too expensive comprise a recipe for economic stagnation.

Not every Texan needs to be a software engineer. But even the best-paying trades are digitally intensive, whether it is auto mechanics or HVAC installation. Using better tools to become more productive underpins economic growth.

The successful companies of the future will go where they can find a skilled workforce. We are behind as a nation, but we are even further behind as a state. We must demand better.

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