Creating a billion jobs
The greatest immediate challenge is a health crisis. Beyond the health crisis, the greatest need for society in the next decade is job creation. Has there ever been a greater entrepreneurial opportunity?
Losing a job
Today is the first day that I will see friends furloughed from their work. Good people, reduced to 80% of their income and not certain when and if that job might come back. People who have studied for years, taken on debt to advance their careers and suffered the consequences of the post 2008 financial crisis world. But they are not, and will not be alone.
I have a deep conviction that work matters. I think we were made to work, in work we find dignity and a way to create. We find a way to contribute to the wellbeing of others and a broader society. It’s a way of providing for ourselves and our family but it’s also a way of playing our part in a society that trades.
This article is a reminder of the mental health toll that not working can take - isolation, depresssion, loneliness - and the resultant consequences in behaviours and societal ills that result from a world that sees those illnesses en masse. Long-term unemployment is exceptionally difficult to combat in particular.
Every entrepreneur wakes looking for THE problem that is global, massive and right now that they can tackle. If ever there was a problem that fit this, surely job creation is it?
It could get much worse
I keep hearing stats on the pessimistic end of the scale - 70% of businesses might go under, charity funding might fall by 60%, attendance at events might be down by 50%, the UK might have to borrow an extra £1 trillion. The collapse in cashflow, and our reliance on debt as a Western society and failure to save for rainy days, means that many are weeks or months away from not being able to survive as organisations.
The support is not enough
Government responses are unprecedented, with the IMF saying this week that the healthcare spending is £2.4 trillion and the stimulus packages so far add up to a further £6.4 trillion. But distribution so far has been slow and poor and companies will be reluctant to wait. Jobs will be lost en masse unless the process speeds up for all size of entity in whatever legal form. The approach of making these loans rather than grants is often also a cause for not taking up the programme - who wants to load up on debt when you don’t know what the economic recovery curve will be?
If you’re an a early stage business, burning cash to pursue growth until you reach a point where you can deliver sustainable break-even at scale, you will not want debt. Grants are essential for this most creative and innovative end of our economy.
Even if we can keep many businesses on life support for now, we can’t surely sustain this until the economy has recovered completely. I read recently that the GDP loss will never be fully recovered. Reflect on that for your business. When the money tap stops, the job losses, restructurings, administrations and insolvencies will rise.
The skills we have are not the skills we need
Compounding this is that there is a need for rapid reskilling. I have seen friends move to work in retail when they had never worked in retail in their life. People have gone from working in offices to working in fields picking fruit. On the other side, I keep hearing need for digital marketing, content marketing, content creation, online education, vocational training, mental health care, community building, climate change solutions, consulting around paths to being 100% digital.
Estimates of unemployment I have seen are up to 47m jobs in the US but who really knows. If we hit 70% of the businesses going under, albeit with many of these being small businesses, then the figures could be far worse. Telling ourselves it’s all going to be fine and you’ll get a new job won’t cut it anymore. We need to provide mass re-skilling. Imagine if the world saw 1/7th of the population lose its job - which at this stage does not seem impossible given we have yet to see the worst of this hit India and Africa. That would be one billion people needing a job.
I also don’t believe everyone will want to work the way they did before 2020. People will seek security in multiple forms of employment, or agility and ability to move careers and adapt to an economy rapidly reshaping. Remote working is hard - and will also be appealing to many. Flexible hours and ability to work for people around the world to reflect where demand is.
Can we create a billion jobs?
Time to create
I’m convinced that the greatest challenge of our generation, once we get past the immediate health crisis of this pandemic, will be to create jobs.
To bring people back into the workforce before we create too much long-term unemployment.
To rapidly re-skill and upskill people with an agile framework so that people can adapt to multiple different careers.
To help people find dignity in new work, to help provide income and rebuild savings, to help our economies flourish.
I’m cracking out a few books that have helped me think through this in the past - they seem very apt for this time. I’m enthusiastic about creating responses to this - whether in helping businesses trying to survive or step into new opportunities; working with entrepreneurs of charity, social enterprise or business form to make new solutions or scale solutions; or in creating solutions directly to how we can create jobs.
The greatest immediate challenge is a health crisis. Beyond the health crisis, the greatest need for society in the next decade is job creation. Has there ever been a greater entrepreneurial opportunity?
What can you do to play a part in creating a billion jobs? Where do you see the opportunity? Where can we collaborate?
