The Great Reskilling Crisis

The World is shifting faster than we can Reskill

I recently read that the SARS epidemic in China in 2003 was the trigger for the Chinese middle-class to embrace online shopping. This lockdown paved the road for the behavior change required for consumers to take up services like Alibaba and JD.com - cementing their permanent place in the hearts, minds and wallets of a new population.

As we sit in the midst of another pandemic, an even bigger population is going through an even more monumental shift — which is that 20M Americans filed for unemployment within 4 weeks of the coronavirus lockdown being announced.

The lockdown had a cascading effect — around 50% worked in industries that can’t work from home, where the cashflow dynamics of those businesses mean that they likely won’t be able to survive any longer, exposing the existential threat of never being able to return to the profession they started the month in. The talk of robotic automation, remote work, online delivery, homeschooling, video calls were eventually going to come, until they became reality seemingly overnight. When industries shift so rapidly the skills base has to as well — leaving a huge chasm of skills that need to be learned rapidly.

When physical work or physical meetings get cut, you can sell, service, or serve others in the same way, leaving millions at home looking for ways to express their skills and relearn to be even more robust. This is the reskilling crisis.

The human capital sitting idle is actually one of the biggest assets to solve this problem. Millions of unemployed workers have skills that can be transferred to others. Software engineers can train baristas to code. Videographers can teach artists to make compelling content. Enterprise sales people can help politics graduates to sell products online. And versa — Musicians can help executives learn to play the guitar. Farmers can help busy housewives grow their own food in their gardens. Financial analysts can help ordinary folk make more informed financial decisions.

Peer-to-peer reskilling will fulfill the promise of the internet as a public good. And beyond homeschooling the combination of fast internet connections, payment gateways, video conversations and an abundance of human experience reskilling will help millions globally have the resilience to withstand changes in industries.

Apprenticeships will be back — at internet scale.

This is one of the biggest fundamental opportunities right now.