Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 9, 1994 TAG: 9402250016
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But beware: Our region's labor force remains ill-prepared to perform the jobs of the future.
If skills aren't upgraded, soon and continuously, coming years will bring more peril than promise for legions of workers. And the Roanoke and New River valleys won't attract the kinds of jobs that assure rising incomes.
So let's fret a bit. Let's also seek ways to enhance the odds both that today's youth will find well-paying work if they choose to stay, and that outsiders will be attracted to opportunities nurtured by the local economy.
Such ways are available. Some can be inferred from Labor Secretary Robert Reich's analysis, summarized in last week's installment of the newspaper's "Peril and Promise" series about regional prospects. In his 1991 book, "The Work of Nations," Reich described three kinds of jobs:
Routine production - repetitively making or doing standardized things in high volume.
In-person services - dealing directly with customers, rather than producing something that could be sold worldwide.
Symbolic-analytic services - manipulating information to identify problems, to solve problems, or to bring together problem-identifiers with problem- solvers.
For our purposes, note that the incomes of the three groups are derived differently. In a globalizing economy, earnings from making standardized goods will tend to fall toward wage levels set by the lowest-cost producers anywhere in the world. This explains why high-school graduates in Western Virginia can no longer hope to achieve middle-class incomes with low-skill production jobs. If automation doesn't get them, foreign competition will.
Income for providers of in-person services - sales people, auto mechanics, food preparers and the like - depends on having enough customers in the local market with enough money to spend. If no new sources of wealth arise to compensate for inevitable losses of good-wage, low-skill jobs in the Roanoke and New River valleys, then the quality and availability of service jobs - and of services themselves - will suffer.
Symbolic analysts, whose ranks include consultants, engineers, computer programmers, researchers and entertainment executives, enjoy more control over their destiny. Their problem-solving yields new ways to do or think about things, and new ways to enjoy life. Suggests Reich: "As the value placed on new designs and concepts continues to grow relative to the value placed on standard products, the demand for symbolic analysts will continue to surge." Of course, higher demand for a worker means higher pay.
Rough analysis this is, by no means comprehensive. But it does throw light on the so-called knowledge-economy, in which Western Virginia will need to find a niche. Symbolic analysts aren't better people. But a successful region will need to cultivate and attract them.
And not just because they command rising incomes. These workers also can help make production smarter, therefore more competitive. Plus, they spend money in the local market, on which in-person service providers depend.
To cultivate homegrown symbolic analysts, our region has got to upgrade its educational offerings. Most schools still reflect the midcentury economy's emphasis on high-volume production. As if on an assembly line, curriculum is tidily divided into subjects, arranged sequentially by grade, taught in specified units of time, and controlled by standardized testing to weed out defective units and return them for reworking.
To produce more than a small elite of symbolic analysts, local schools should worry less about transmitting facts and more about encouraging curiosity, skepticism and creativity. They must teach the ability to detect underlying patterns and relationships, an enthusiasm for self-guided experimentation, and the capacity to collaborate.
Students, for their part, must remain students longer. Census figures indicate that 59 percent of residents 25 years and older in the Roanoke and New River valleys have only a high-school education or less. Sorry, that won't cut it in the jobs of the future. Not only will most young people need two years of formal training beyond high school, at a minimum. All workers will also have to grow accustomed to lifelong learning if they and the region are to thrive.
To attract symbolic analysts from outside the region, education again is a priority, since they will demand such schools for their children. Beyond this, local leaders need to do two things:
f\ Zapf Dingbats f-b f-inoResolve to guide growth in ways that protect and promote special assets that draw people here in the first place: the wooded mountain downtown, for instance; the scenery and recreation; a brilliant array of cultural attractions, our neighborhoods' livability.
f\ Zapf Dingbats f-b f-inoFocus economic-development efforts on nurturing what Reich calls "dynamic learning communities" already emerging in the region. Here the connection with higher education, particularly Virginia Tech, is crucial.
The Roanoke-New River area won't ever be a Silicon Valley, but it might become a regional locus for activity and innovation in biotechnology, fiber optics, wireless communications, creative health care, transportation, eco-tourism or other industries - all of which are already here and growing.
In coming years, not just regional marketing but the infrastructure for such development must be upgraded: with small-business incubators, an "electronic village" expanding from Blacksburg, the "smart highway" linking the New River and Roanoke valleys, biotech farms associated with Tech, a convention center, an environmental education center at Explore Park, etc.
Where symbolic analysts cluster, they attract others like themselves. They also support expanding incomes - which everyone wants, but which require education and preparation. A good time to get started is now.
by CNB