More than ever, people are embracing a non-linear, multi-stage life as the new normal. To make the most of our time, we’ll need to build on our positive habits and create new ones. These are seven easy ways to do that.
Tag: AARP
How You Learn Will Matter Much More in the Future Workplace
In today’s technological workplace, knowing how to learn is key to keeping pace with change. We’ve entered a new work culture, one where technology executes while humans learn and create new value. Being able to acquire new skills is becoming a skill in itself: In this new era, those who learn and adapt fastest will thrive.
We‘ve all heard that different people learn in different ways. But the idea that personal learning styles are crucial to successful education models has been debunked as little more than a myth. As it turns out, learning styles aren’t entirely innate, so it likely doesn’t matter whether you’re a visual learner or a kinetic learner, a “reflector” or a “theorist.” What matters more is your experience of learning — how you’ve learned how to learn — and the experience you bring to what you’re learning.
While people might not strictly learn in their own unique style, they do tend to learn differently depending on their age. For example, several studies have compared the way that older and younger adults learn and found that there are important differences that can be leveraged by employers.
A 2014 Brown University study scanned students’ brains as they learned. When humans acquire new information, our brain cell structures change in order to store it, a phenomenon known as “plasticity.” The researchers found that older and younger adults learned at the same rate, but they tended to store new information in different parts of their brains.
What does that mean in practice? One study compared traditional-age college students in their late teens and early 20s with adults returning to college in their 30s, 40s and 50s. It found that the older group tended to take more time to analyze and break down new information rather than simply memorize it.
And yet another study found that older students were better at staying organized and felt less stressed by coursework than their traditional-age peers. “Students with more life-roles and responsibilities” — that is, older students — “may be more adept at the mechanics of time management such as making lists and scheduling activities in advance,” the researcher concluded.
There’s also evidence that as people age, understanding the process of learning becomes more important to them. Mid-career and older workers often want to understand why they’re learning a new skill — how it will contribute to their overall mission, how it fits in with what they already know and how they can deploy it creatively in the future. In contrast, younger learners are often ready to soak up knowledge as it’s presented to them and figure out how it fits into their work later.
This is important because all people are being called upon to keep learning new skills much later into adulthood than ever before. We’re in the midst of an unprecedented, rapid technology shift. Whereas previous generations could learn a trade and stay at it for a lifetime, today’s workers are asked to constantly assimilate new information, new skills and in some cases, entirely new jobs.
As future-of-work strategist Heather McGowan, co-founder of Work to Learn, has said, “this shift [in technology] requires us to think differently about both work and learning. In the past, we learned once in order to work, but we must now work to continuously learn.”
Then there’s the fact that older adults are staying on the job much longer. Summarizing a 2018 study, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported that in 2000, about one in 10 Americans aged 65 to 74 worked. Today, roughly a quarter of that age group works, with that figure expected to grow to one in three in the next few years.
Economic strain can play a role in that, as do longer lifespans. But many older employees also say they simply take satisfaction from having meaningful work. As they reach the mid- to late-career stage, people start to take inventory of their work as it pertains to both purpose and self-expression. Some find a greater connection to their passions, whereas others wish to recast their career in greater alignment with their values.
The result is a much more multigenerational workforce, according to the AARP. It isn’t unusual for a 22-year-old and a 65-year-old to be learning the same new tech skill at the same time from the same supervisor. Or perhaps one employee is teaching the other — and either could be the instructor. That makes it important to understand your own learning style as well as that of others, so you can better communicate no matter if you’re the teacher or the student.
Here’s an example: Imagine that your manager is showing you and a colleague a new process for publishing documents online. Are you most likely to: A) Memorize the sequence of clicks and keystrokes; or B) Figure out what each click in the sequence is doing?
If you answered “A,” you learn in a way typical of people in their 20s. It might seem easier to simply memorize or write down the sequence of commands without worrying about why it is the way it is. It might seem frustrating when your fellow employee insists on understanding the inner workings of every process. But bear with them, because it will help the lesson stick in the long run — and you might learn something in the process that you can apply in your work.
If you answered “B,” you learn in a way more typical of people over 30. You don’t just want to go through the steps, as you won’t remember them unless you know the logic behind each one. You should realize that your coworker might not need the full explanation of what they’re doing — they might just need a quick rundown of how to work the system. That doesn’t mean they’re not absorbing what’s being said, but they might need to come to you if they run into trouble since you might have a deeper understanding of the process.
When you understand how you approach new information and new skills, it will be easier to adjust your style to help others. As AARP’s Debra Whitman has noted, “In today’s era of rapid change… a single dose of education is not enough. Explicit knowledge is easily accessible from our devices and ripe for automation. Workers maintain their value by continuing to learn and adapt.”
As multigenerational workplaces embrace how different people learn at different stages of life, it will become easier to unify all employees across cultural and technological divides. In this way companies will be better able to optimize the different skills and experiences their age-diverse employees bring to the table. AARP believes that learning is a social act that is much more fun and meaningful when it happens in collaboration with others.
This article was produced in partnership with AARP. You can learn more here about how AARP is shaping the Future of Work.
The Role of Purpose in the Workplace of the Future
There’s a story about three men hauling stones that the artist Ben Shahn famously retells in his 1957 book, “The Shape of Content.” The story goes like this: As the men are toiling, a nameless passerby asks each of the three “in what work they were engaged.” As Shahn tells it, the three men each give three very different replies:
“The first said, ‘I toil from sunup to sundown and all I receive for my pains is a few francs a day.’
“The second said, ‘I’m glad enough to wheel this wheelbarrow for I have been out of work for many months and I have a family to support.’
“The third said, ‘I am building Chartres Cathedral.’”
The third man, Shahn intended his readers to understand, was not a laborer but an artist — someone whose self-image and engagement in his work comes from a vision of a larger purpose.
Should work be synonymous with our identities? Should it give us our sense of purpose? We get to know each other with the ubiquitous question, “So what do you do for work?” and the answer has become a dangerous proxy for our identity.
For generations, we’ve asked workers to approach their jobs the way the first two laborers did — as a source of livelihood, a series of actions and a paycheck, at best. Over the past hundred years, we have grown used to a fixed occupational identity, where what we do has become who we are.
In earlier decades — decades in which many current workers were raised — people could expect to live middle-class lives, with mostly unchanging blue- and white-collar jobs. They were happy to have work, used their wages to buy houses and establish families, and saved their passions and sense of purpose for their off-hours. But those jobs are mostly gone, and with them our way of working has changed.
According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “In 1970, blue-collar jobs were 31.2% of total nonfarm employment. By 2016, their share had fallen to 13.6% of total employment.”
As salaries have failed to keep up with inflation, new entries into the workforce often find themselves forced to work several unrelated jobs. They remain unable to afford families, houses or hobbies, and wonder if such grueling work is worthwhile.
About a third of today’s workforce is involved in the gig economy, in which freelancers and part-time contractors work job-to-job with little security and few employment rights. Some are self-employed, while others work gigs on the side.
It’s a trend that’s growing: A 2018 NPR/Marist poll predicted that contract workers and freelancers could make up half the workforce within the decade. But even as more people derive their income from the gig economy, they still make less than their peers in traditional jobs, according to a Deloitte analysis of more than 10 years’ worth of survey data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Companies can save up to 30% by hiring contract workers and, as evolving technology replaces the need for human workers, more full-time jobs are likely to become part-time ones.
Given the trends, it’s no surprise if many of today’s workers — including older people who are working later and longer than previous generations — identify with the first laborer in Shahn’s story, the one who sees himself as performing backbreaking work for meager pay.
Meanwhile, the question, “What do you do?” is becoming less meaningful to Gen Zers, typically defined as those born between 1997–2017, who aren’t inclined to define themselves based on a single occupation. Born into the gig economy, they may expect to have many different jobs throughout their lives.
All of this means that the culture of work has to change to compensate. Work must, simply, become more meaningful — more purpose-driven — and harness uniquely human creativity. According to Ramsey Alwin, Director of Financial Resilience Thought Leadership at AARP, it will become increasingly important for humans to do what humans do best: learn, adapt, and make meaning.
Why do gig workers need meaning? It might seem like all the power is in the employers’ hands — after all, gig workers can always be easily replaced. But for employers, this reductive approach can create negative consequences for their businesses. As the co-founder of WeGoLook, a gig economy platform for enterprise customers, Robin Smith has noted that companies like hers can quickly sink if they become known as bad employers. “One gig worker’s negative experience with your company may not seem to matter, but negative news travels fast. Especially online!” she wrote.
The more companies rely on part-time contractors, the more important these workers will become. Being able to attract a diverse, capable group of freelancers — and retain them — will remain a goal for businesses. According to Heather McGowan, Global Futurist and founder of Work to Learn, “we will work in not one or two jobs in our careers but ten or more across multiple industries, [so] we cannot define ourselves by what we do; rather, we must connect to the motivation that comes from purpose.”
If companies want to inspire these workers, they’ll have to make them feel like they’re contributing to something bigger than themselves. There’s already evidence that this is what freelancers value: A 2016 report by IBM’s Smarter Workforce Institute surveyed over 33,000 contract workers from 26 different countries and found that compared to their full-time colleagues, they tended to be more engaged, more innovative and creative.
At the time, Great Place to Work Institute — an employment think tank that produces Fortune’s annual 100 Best Companies to Work For list — concluded that to build trust with contract employees, companies needed to inspire them. “Build a sense of inspiration by sharing the mission and vision of your organization with independent employees, so they understand how their efforts help drive a greater purpose,” the researchers wrote.
Robin Smith agreed: “Purpose is more important than pay in retaining millennial employees,” she wrote on the WeGoWork blog. “Companies must now consider the intrinsic motivation when hiring employees. A gig worker who holds a shared purpose with your organization is more likely to stay and feel connected to the group.”
According to Alwin, “We need to help people build resilient and adaptive identities grounded in and fueled by their purpose, passions, and creativity.”
In short, companies have to make it clear to employees of all generations — both full-time and part-time — that they aren’t like the first two laborers in Shahn’s analogy.
They’re not just hauling rocks. They’re building cathedrals.
Update: This article was updated to clarify quote attribution on January 23.
This article was produced in partnership with AARP. You can learn more here about how AARP is shaping the Future of Work.
Keeping the Future of Work Human
The last few centuries have seen the workplace transform several times — first by machinery during the Industrial Revolution, then by computers and the advent of the internet. Those changes may have felt sudden at the time, but they’ll seem gradual compared to the next few years, as artificial intelligence becomes more vital to workplaces.
We’re living through the most rapid workplace changes in history, argue the AARP’s Debra Whitman and Heather McGowan, a future-of-work strategist, in a blog post published on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Forum. According to Whitman and McGowan, technology is transforming our jobs, from small tasks to the larger structure of companies. Business models, workforce hierarchies and job roles are all adapting in response.
Three distinct eras have driven the changing nature of work: The First Industrial Revolution, with the rise of the steam engine, lasted from about 1760 to 1830; the Second Industrial Revolution, marked by electrification and mass manufacturing, spanned the late-19th century to about 1914; and the Third Industrial Revolution, exemplified by computerization and the automation of manufacturing, began in the 1950s.
We’re quite possibly on the verge of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, one which revolves around algorithms, automation and, especially, AI.
What does AI do best? Because the technology is constantly changing, it’s hard to say. But so far AI has excelled at pattern recognition. With the ability to scan a huge amount of data faster than humans can, AI can recognize patterns in data that we might miss, and it can then use those patterns to make predictions.
“AI will be as central to the white-collar office environment as robotics has been to the production economy,” Mark Muro, senior fellow and policy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, told Axios. He added that it will “fundamentally change what work is and what humans do.”
This isn’t limited to certain industries or job levels. A recent study by a Stanford University economist cross-referenced keywords in AI patents with keywords in job descriptions. His research predicts that many different tasks currently performed by humans — from operating power plants to diagnosing diseases — are vulnerable to being taken over by AI. The more information a worker processes, the more likely it is that an AI could do the same job better: Lab technicians, optometrists and chemical engineers were among the professions whose jobs were most exposed.
Both old and young workers will be affected by this shift. As jobs become more technical, employer bias against older workers grows. At the same time, many of the jobs AI will eliminate are entry-level positions, making it harder for young workers to break into their chosen industries. Taken together, some experts predict a wave of automation that may eliminate 14.7 million jobs in coming years.
When AI integration is viewed this way, it can sound alarming. “With each technological leap forward, there is a parallel rise in fear that humanity will somehow be displaced,” wrote Google’s Ben Jones. But in the end, he argues, AI is only a tool: “There’s much more to be gained by embracing machine learning as an accelerant for our creative powers.”
Tech analyst Benedict Evans envisions AI as being like an unlimited number of interns who can search through data for you — or just one intern who is very, very fast.
AI can do the legwork, but the real creative thought still has to come from the human expert deploying it. So we’ll need to maximize creativity in our workers and teach them how to use AIs to further their own visions.
As AARP’s Whitman and McGowan wrote, the workplace of the future will depend on “hard-to-codify abilities, traits and mind-sets like empathy, social and emotional intelligence, judgment, design mind-set, sense-making, collaboration and communication.”
Here’s an example of how human creativity and AI can work together: Not long ago, Wired magazine covered how AI is being used to “generate” novels, with the headline “Text-Savvy AI Is Here to Write Fiction.”
It was the latest in a series of similar news stories. Every few years articles are published hinting that AI might replace human writers. “New AI Fake Text Generator May Be Too Dangerous To Release” declared a headline last year in The Guardian.
But despite those sensational headlines, prose produced by an AI actually isn’t that good — and certainly not comparable to a human author’s. In fact, the writers profiled in the Wired article weren’t computers — they were human. By itself, reporter Gregory Barber wrote, AI “can’t write a novel; not even the semblance, if you’re thinking Austen or Franzen. It can barely get out a sentence before losing the thread.”
Instead, clever creatives are using AI as a supplemental tool to create work according to the parameters they choose. The AI is just a more sophisticated version of creativity constraint games used by writers as far back as the French Oulipo collective. It could be argued that an AI functions less like a creator and more like the simple “story cubes” — dice with random images printed on each side — that some people use for inspiration.
One writer created a code to analyze the trickiest passages of Thomas Beckett’s novel “Watt” and generated a novel-length manuscript based on them (titled, naturally, “Megawatt”). Another instructed his AI intern to search for phrases from online dream diaries, which he repurposed for his novel.
Some of these works couldn’t have been created without AI. But just as importantly, they couldn’t have been created without the conceptualization and impetus of a human mind.
There’s no reason why human workers can’t use AI in the same way; that is, to allow people access to work that’s more creative and interesting, and assign AI the repetitive, high-volume data-processing tasks that it can perform so easily.
In order to keep work human — and to keep human jobs available — we’ll have to design educational systems that prize the kind of experience, creativity, collaboration and critical thinking skills only humans can bring to the job.
This article was produced in partnership with AARP. You can learn more here about how AARP is shaping the Future of Work.
This Army Vet Has Driven 165,000 Miles to Help His Fellow Soldiers Receive Medical Care
Prowers County, Colo. sits in the rural southeast corner of the state on the Kansas border, more than four hours away from Denver. Its remote locale makes it difficult for the elderly and disabled veterans who live there to get to their far-flung medical appointments.
Luckily, these American heroes can count on champion volunteer driver Cliff Boxley, who doesn’t hesitate to set out at 4 a.m. — sometimes up to four days a week — to bring them to their doctors’ appointments in Denver, Pueblo, La Junta and Colorado Springs.
Boxley himself served in the Army from 1972 to 1980 and has kept close to his fellow vets, in part through his serving of four terms on the Board of Governors for the First Cavalry Division Association.
In 2007, he started driving veterans in Prowers County to their medical appointments and has since racked up more than 6,000 volunteer hours — driving a total 165,000 miles in that time.
“I started driving because I got a call from Carol Grauberger one day. She was the person who started this service in Prowers County for the veterans. That was seven years and over 150,000 miles ago,” he tells Russ Baldwin of The Prowers Journal.
For all those hours on the road, Boxley was honored with the 2014 AARP Andrus Award for Colorado, which is given to outstanding volunteers making a difference in the lives of seniors from each state.
“Rural veterans tend to be short-changed when it comes to VA healthcare, with few advocates for them in this region. In the military, we always took care of each other, so this is my way of doing that,” Boxley tells Baldwin.
MORE: This Special Volunteer Has Spent More Than 150,000 Miles Behind The Wheel Helping Vets