Third Industrial Revolution
Third Industrial Revolution based on Offshoring and Education It’s no doubt that our economy is changing and so is the world we live in. The major changes in our society stared off with the First Industrial Revolution. Many jobs changed from farm to factory beginning in the late 18th century. This was the largest revolution because it shaped the way we live today. The second revolution was the shift from manufacturing jobs toward service jobs. It’s believed that we are still in this shift. Now we are on the brink of a third industrial revolution which is due to the increase of technology.
Often called the Information Age, the third revolution will require change as the first and second have before. However, it seems as if little changes have been made to accommodate the changing world. We are now facing the struggle of keeping jobs in the country and along with that comes the need to enhance our educational system. The two may not seem to work together, but they do. Improvement in education may change the way we off shoring our jobs. There has been suggested a few ways that could help improve United States and keep us on top instead of having other countries take our jobs.
Alan S. Blinder is the Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He is the one that presented the idea of changing the way we educate our youngster to have them better prepared for the future. Researching his ideas and theories on how to solve the problem with education, I did agree with him on most of his theories. In the past the fight for our jobs was with computers and technology. Many jobs were being taken by computers, which resulted in many people being laid-off. We can’t deny that we do need computers and the improvement of technology makes our lives easier.
We can’t “dumb down” our economy to keep jobs. People eventually had to accept the increase of computers and the facts that many jobs we needed to do, can now be done for us. We now have another force that’s taking our jobs, offshoring. Offshoring is taking over many companies and there is nothing we can do about it. The good deal of having someone do the same job for a lot less is too good of a deal for a company to pass up. For the heads of companies they love the idea, but for the average worker we have to compete with workers in India and Asia for jobs in our own country.
Offshoring is no longer only limited to service jobs. It was thought that call centers and manufacturing companies were the jobs affected for foreigners taking their jobs, but with the increase in technology that is no longer the case. With the increase of offshoring, the jobs more aimed at leaving the country are impersonal jobs. By not needing face to face contact with customers, it makes it easier to have the job completed overseas. Offshoring is an event that we can prepare for, by better preparing the workforce for a new economy of work.
Training the future needs to be different than in the past because we are emerging into a whole new era. The increase of computers causes an increase of impersonal jobs, which makes it easy to complete many services by electronic means. Blinder’s suggested, “We need to think about, plan, and probably redesign our educational system with the crucial distinction between personal service jobs and impersonal service jobs in mind. ” Because many impersonal are the first ones being offshoring, the more personal jobs are the one staying in the country.
We do need to help the future understand the change that is progressing around us. It does make sense that we need to change our educational system from one that was implemented over 50 years ago. Getting every school and college to change their curriculum will take time and work, but with an effective plan the need for change will eventually happen. The essential need for education needs to change. Learning about a careers that will be available years down the line, will help us be more prepared. Jobs that can’t be offshored or done by a machine will be the product of a new growing economy.
Suggestions of ways to improve the educational system would be to include the following. To keep jobs we need to focus on the advancement of skills that cannot be outperformed by a computer or taken away by someone overseas. The thing that makes us American and different than any other culture is what we need to put emphasis on. Creativity, ingenuity, spontaneity, culture, interpersonal relations, etc. are factors that make us an individual and if these are applied into the education system it’s possible that we will gain more jobs back.
Memorization seems to be something that many schools try to help develop, but that skill is something that a computer can very well accomplish better than the average worker could. Also by bringing in more group and interactive activities we could improve our personal skills. Just a few newer approaches to increasing the way we learn and information that we learn can help put us on the right track to keeping jobs that we could do better than a foreign country and we could be better prepared for jobs that won’t be offshored.
Blinder stated as his main objective, “We need to focus on preparing more college students for the high-end jobs that are unlikely to move offshore, and on developing a creative workforce that will keep America incubating and developing new processes, new products, and entirely new industries. Offshoring is, after all, mostly about following and copying. Americans need to lead and innovate instead, just as we have in the past. Summary The increase of technology has Americans sending off our jobs overseas. We can compete with foreign countries and computers to keep more jobs in the U.
S. One important factor to help us is to improve the way we are educating our future. We need to change the system implementing new ways to educate. We also need to change focus of the lesson and focus on new concepts that in the end can make us competitor with computers and foreign countries. Many people don’t know that change is needed and are perfectly fine with the system we have set up now. The ideas that Blinder suggested for us are just ideas that could possibly have us heading in the right direction for the future.
Conclusions and Recommendations By using and implementing the information that Blinder has given will help to successfully keep the economy on track and not have it handed over to another country. The educational system we have now hasn’t been changed for many years and as the world is changing we also need to change along with it. Because sometimes it can be hard to adjust to change, and many people don’t like change getting the information publicized and persuading policy holders will speed up the progress for change.
