Skills gaps and the question we should be asking

There’s an anomaly in the workplace. Companies are looking for skilled people. Skilled people are looking for better opportunities, and yet there’s still a gap. The sectors where people traditionally aspired to work in, are contracting. Graduates who have invested years of study to get a degree are struggling to find work that aligns with what they studied.

Yet we still talk about a skills gap, and honestly, we’ve been talking about it for years. Despite the internships, apprenticeships and skills development programs run by companies, industry bodies, as well as career days at schools, not much seems to be changing. Maybe that’s exactly where it needs to start – in schools, in how we talk about careers in the first place.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

From the time we first start attending primary school, this is the question we hear. “What do we want to be” is linked to an aspiration of becoming a lawyer, doctor, an engineer, or a train driver as though by achieving this, we’ll be set for life. In reality, most people don’t become what they dreamed of at age 5. Instead, they enter the work place, taking on an office job, or work in retail, trades or manufacturing.  Anything really, that delivers a regular paycheque, because along the way, the dream died.

What if we were to start asking a different question from what do you want to be? Shift the focus from a job title to something more proactive. What if we were to ask: What problems would you love to solve?

Already you’re starting to think about the plastic pollution you saw accumulated in the park down the road, well, maybe not at 5... You’re thinking of how you’d like to cycle to the shops, but the streets are too narrow and not really that safe. You’re wondering why housing is so expensive to maintain.

You’ll see, problems… in everyday life. Things that frustrate, or just don’t sit right. That make you say: It shouldn’t be like that. Maybe I can do something about it. You become curious.

What would you like to solve?

It’s a powerful question that shifts the focus from passively accepting a job title, to actively pursuing a solution to a real-world problem. It’s no longer a career, instead it becomes a personal mission – one that’s linked to values – and that’s what makes it so powerful.

Asking this question to school goers has even more impact, as it initiates the suggestion that each individual could contribute to creating solutions. It’s a shift in attitude the world sorely needs. For decades we’ve been focused on growth and advancement, and that advancement has been all about ease and convenience. Single use plastic and packaging is a prime example of that.

A hundred years ago, single-use anything didn’t really exist, now it’s become the norm. It’s considered easier to buy coffee in a cup that can simply be tossed in a bin when finished. Much easier than remembering to take your own mug and then washing it out afterwards.  

The argument is often that these modern conveniences have created industries of their own, so what’s the problem, it’s creating economic opportunity – coffee shops, packaging manufacturing, even recyclers have benefitted. Except the scale of impact of our modern habits were underestimated and the problems have compounded.

Now that the problems are more obvious, it makes even more sense to be asking: What do you want to solve. It’s especially relevant if the waste and resource industry is to find the 68,000 people needed in the next decade.

A clearer dream for a better future

If we start asking these questions in schools at career days, and show them how careers are linked to building those solutions, it broadens perspectives and opportunities. For example: When a child says they want to become a robotics engineer, don’t just celebrate that they have ambitions and leave it there.

Rather ask: What kind of robots will you be building? What will they do? How will they be helping people or the planet? And quite importantly - what materials will you use? It’s also then possible to share with them real world examples of how robots are currently used in industry and what problems are currently being solved using robotics.

Most people generally only have a small window into what a career could look like. Expanding on that and showing real world examples is one way to build interest in working in the waste sector – especially when it’s possible to demonstrate which problems we’re working to solve and how we’re going about it in the real world.