The American Scene; Unidentified

Lowell 5 to 10 above. And tomorrow partly cloudy and cold, high around 15. Current temperature at midway 18 Grand Park 21. This is WMACU and WMACU FM and BC in Chicago, broadcasting all the news at any time. The American Scene, a series of pre -recorded programs providing a closer look at those things which form our contemporary society. Produced by the Illinois Institute of Technology and Cooperation with WMACU, the discussion today will consider job horizons. Now here's our host, Dr. Smithberg. Good morning, this is Donald Smithberg for the Illinois Institute of Technology on the American Scene. In just 36 years we'll be entering the 20th century. A student entering college this fall will be fined in his mid -50s at the turn of the century. By today's standard, still at the height of his career. A student entering high school may well find

after earning his PhD in about 10 years, that he would be able to pursue a career that does not exist at all today. Rapid change is certainly the central feature of our era. This fact is a vexing problem to those seeking careers as well as to those now pursuing careers. For instance, more than half the jobs which this year's college graduates are employed and did not exist when the graduates were born. A sizable share of the gross national product consists of goods and services that did not exist a generation ago, such as synthetic fabrics, television, jet transport computers. The 800 -page occupational outlook handbook published by the Department of Labor lists more than 700 kinds of jobs represented in today's economy. Without doubt, the next edition will list many more occupations not yet created. Change is everywhere, and the political, social, and economic and scientific revolution sweeping the world will undoubtedly increase in the future. It is already apparent that the number of complex

jobs is increasing, the number of unskilled jobs is decreasing, the fastest growing occupations require more skill and education than ever before, and revolutionary change already demands a constant updating of knowledge. Selecting a career is probably as important a decision as a person will ever make. His education and occupation pretty well determine his future income, his chance for steady employment, the kind of a home he has, his opportunity for leisure and eventually the security of his old age. The future makes little provision for the school dropout or the unskilled laborer. He is unable to compete, and the jobs he used to fill are fast disappearing. New ways of making things, the discovery of new things to make, new patterns of living, and new solutions to old problems are continually changing the kind of careers available. The subject of this series in the American scene is to look at the job horizon, to try and determine what

might be expected to happen to career opportunities in the next few decades. Joining me in this first program I would like to welcome Dr. Stanley Block, chairman of the Department of Industrial Engineering at IIT, and Mr. George Phillips, director of management research at the IIT Research Institute. Welcome to the program gentlemen. And perhaps we ought to start out, maybe George you might want to start out by looking at this problem in terms of what is happening in the nature of computers and what to. What does that mean in terms of the career opportunities for young people? Well, I think it means quite a good deal, Don. Virtually all of us have seen ourselves affected by the computer one way or another, either in employment or a customer or even as a traveler of the airlines. But in many ways we have yet to feel the full impact and the significance of the computer on the employee, on the consumer, on the general public. Most of the attention to date has focused either on the computer and

space applications and guiding very complex missiles to a target in the future, on the other hand, on the business machine. But very rapidly we're finding a growing use of the computer in the actual manufacturing process. We are now at the point where it's economically feasible and productively advantageous to use a computer controlled piece of equipment to automatically cut complex shapes and in some cases even to begin to assemble that. By the same token we find the computer is growing in its use in the medical field, in the art of medicine as a diagnostic device, as a temperature sensing device in parts and in accuracies unknown before. We also find it expanding in the processing industries, automatically controlled production of chemicals and utilities and what have you. Of course looking into the future as a hazardous occupation, unless you choose to look far enough into the future so that you're not here when someone challenges you. But I think one point does come out,

that more and more in the future we're going to find many jobs will be affected by and will be part and parcel of a computer system. Hence as one general guideline if you will, I think a wise outlook for any individual considering a career at this time is to take stock of his own interests and capability in the general field of mathematics. But over and beyond that start looking and becoming acquainted with the use of computers in various fields. Just one example I think is a very important one. Today we and the metalworking industry have a great requirement for machinists, skilled people capable of working the loads and milling machines and what have you. In about five to ten years, it will may be possible that this man, the machinist, may be replaced by a parts programmer, an individual unknown today. The parts programmer will have to be less the skilled machinist than his present counterpart. You'll have to know machining and equipment, but more importantly

you'll have to know programming, computers, you'll also have to know a bit about engineering. So computers I think are ubiquitous today. I think they're going to become ever more important in the economy of the future as well. Stan, you've been working in this general area of industrial relations. What do you see in terms of a young man starting out choosing a career in terms of where should he go, what should he do? This is the first of a series of programs as I started out by saying, how's it going to affect industrial management relations? Well, Don, I would certainly agree that one of the things we need is a broader and more intensive education on the part of our young people today. There just aren't going to be the unskilled jobs and the semi -skilled jobs that we have had before. And these fellows are going to have to move up the ranks and their comprehension, certainly in their understanding of

mathematics and the quantitative techniques. And they're also going to have to broaden out a great deal. We find that the fellow who could work in a corner by himself is being largely obsolete. That more and more it's becoming a team activity. And that even the men who formerly were specialists, for example, an electrician, if he's to repair some of the complex automation equipment or that we have, he finds that he ought to know something about hydraulics and mechanics and as well as electrical aspects. He just can't be compartmented in his specialization anymore. Well, you and I are as educators. What does that mean in terms of revising our curricula and other techniques that we can use to help these people along the line? And shouldn't it start much earlier than the college when we get a person in college as a freshman? He's fairly well -oriented in what he wants or what

is the background or he's, let's say, somewhat limited by his prior training. Where should we start? And can we predict with any accuracy what is likely to be the demands in the future for different kinds of careers stand? You've been working in a dust bill engineering and I think that that's on the forefront of this area. Well, I think that certainly what we need to do even in the high school is something which I'm pleased seems to be done as an upgrading and getting out of a rut teaching our young people to learn and to think creatively. I think this is one of the geniuses of the American education system. I know it's often deprecated that we don't press our students as hard as the Europeans do. But one of the things which I think is the most valuable attribute is to be able to think logically and creatively in a given situation. This we say is the role of the industrial engineer but I think it's the role of

every progressive person. What are we trying to accomplish in a given situation? Get that objective in mind and then what are our alternative ways of meeting that objective? And then thinking creatively, not just how it's been done in the past but how it could be done. And this is no longer a special province of any one group of professional people or even of the skilled people but I think is increasingly a mark of the man who's going to move ahead. The man who can think logically and creatively. George, you were saying in terms of the statement I made at the outset that with some reasonable degree of predictability we can sort of know what's going to happen. So let's say if you were a high school counselor you could predict what job opportunities would be available in the next 20 years and let's say in the steel working industry or one of the other areas where you've had experience. To what extent is

that true or to what extent is the rapidity, the rate of invention taking over so fast that it renders you pretty hopeless in terms of trying to predict the outcome? I think you can find good examples on both ends of the poll of the spectrum. I think there are industries where in the technologies moving so quickly that yesterday's work is obsolete today. This is happening in some areas of medicine curse currently it's happening in electronics and what have you. But for the bulk of our industries it's our past over the last 15 or 20 years and our future is essentially an evolutionary process. The equipment in some cases are improved and other instances there are new equipment coming into play. Now you mentioned the steel industry. This is one in which we've been fairly intimate with over the last several years and studying it and taking a look at it and we feel fairly safe in saying that in the next

10 years these are the likely processes which will replace the current methods of making steel, current methods of forming steel. And as a consequence of that since these processes exist today in various stages of development and prototype one can begin to determine the kind of skills that one will require five years and 10 years and in fact the steel companies are so doing. There are a number of changes that have taken place in their own hiring practices and procedures. As short as five years ago a man without a high school diploma could get employment in the steel mill today that's very rarely the case. A respective of what is job is today there's a requirement that it will probably be retrained in two years or three years or what have you and we know the retraining that's going to take place. Again we can take a look at the entire metal working industry and we find here the fact that we're growing a generation of equipment which is unknown up until recently but which we can project

with a fair degree of reasonableness the fact that we will have automatically programmed and controlled equipment. And here can project the kind of skills that one would require. It would be very dangerous however to try and generalize. We've been taking a look intensively at some eight or nine specific industries at the Illinois Institute of Technology and at IIT Research Institute. And the point that comes up is you cannot generalize you cannot say we're going to require less skilled labor or more skilled labor. By way of illustration it appears that there will be less of a demand for skilled labor in the metal working and in the printing industry in the future than there is right now. There will be another kind of requirement which will grow that of the maintenance man which Stan mentioned and this man is not going to be a tinkerer. He's not going to be a wrench and hammer and screwdriver man. He's going to have to be in essence a doctor. He'll be a

diagnostician. He'll have to work with these complex pieces of equipment that cost thousands of dollars per minute when they're not operating. And so there will be a growing skill there but on the other hand you may find traditional skills dropping off. I'm just going to say I wonder if we ought to maybe part of the problem is our definition of what is a skilled and semi skilled man. Maybe what we're doing is upgrading here that in the printing industry the photo engraver or the line of type operator or the press operator we have referred to as a skilled man in these areas. But it seems to me as we look at some other types of industry that essentially this man is a machine operator that he is doing a repetitive task over and over again. And this is the type of thing of course which is going to be affected by mechanization and automation and by computer controls and replaced. Whereas when we get into the man who can visualize the processing as a whole, how do you get

from the raw materials you have to the finished product that you want. And what equipment is involved, how is it set up, how is it arranged, how is it programmed in the case of computers that how is it repaired and maintained what sort of breakdowns. And it seems to me that many of these people that we have said were skilled craftsmen and tradesmen really we're going to reclassify a semi skilled and bring in this higher level of people with a broad systems approach and understanding. Stan you know that ourselves and almost every other university in the country of any major consequences working on programs that we call programs of continuing education. I suppose one thing if we get involved in this factor of the very rapid change that the university will have a new role to play in the sense of retraining or retraining or reintroducing persons. It's into skills as they develop in the

sciences and in the applied sciences. Do you think that that's possible so that you can give a man a basic education, a basic knowledge of some of the some of the factors that are affecting that will possibly affect careers such as George was suggesting and then sort of when things develop bringing back for a period of time. As you know we have this program on campus now with the Illinois Bell people who were bringing back brought back for training and specialized areas which perhaps didn't exist when they went to engineering school and most of them were engineers. And maybe the university has a different role to play. What do you think about that George? Well I'm not a academician but hasn't the role of the university or at least some of the current thought

move from either side of the pendulum from what's even from the First World War. I recall there was always a great interest and a great requirement for developing the generalist the whole man and of course including humanities and arts as well as a technical field. And then there was a time and tendency for a high degree of specialization and then again you find ourselves talking about a generalist at this point in time. I don't think you can talk about a generalist today not in the technical fields or not really in the professional fields. I think at the educational level the point you make simply from an observing experience point of view of a general education which then allows that individual to pick out a specific career or a specific area probably in his junior or his final year rather than his freshman year is highly desirable. There are a number of engineering schools I know that have gone to a five year curriculum. They just don't believe that with the basic knowledge now available that they can get it across in four years. And so they go to five but I think we're

in the age of the specialist and that we can't avoid developing people with a great depth of knowledge in a given area of competence. What about the special problem in an organization like IITRA to research institute where you're heavily engaged in mostly applied research some basic research going on there. Where do you go to find the people and what would you suggest let's say for a person, a young person who would like to have a career and one of the many phases that IITRA is working on. Well, our people come to us from many many sources many come to us directly from industry others come to us from educational academic organizations others come to us from government others come from similar type organizations they just just come thank the Lord. But the point that's important here is that we find that emphasizes two points early may have I think stand that it's impossible for the man

to work alone. The specialist becomes so specialist specialist specialist in his knowledge that rarely do you get a problem that's defined that he can handle by himself. And so whereas we have some five or six basic divisions or breakdowns at the IIT research institute we find a growing incidence of interdisciplinary work of physicist a chemist a biochemist and a mathematician as well as a man from the economics research group working together on one basic problem. And so we find this has become the mechanism of attacking many of these technical problems and many operational problems in our group which emphasizes the point that we still probably have to learn some more of the basics of group organization and group dynamics organization activity. Be it a research organization or such as a tree or be it a productive plant and playing essentially non skilled individuals who do have nonetheless an interrelationship with technical people and semi technicians and engineering as well. So that within

this age of equipment and computers and what have you I think the point made by Stan is the most important one. The greatest ingredient is the ability and success as the ability to work with one's co -workers and with the superiors and also work within an organization. There are few opportunities other than possibly in the creative arts for a man to function all solely by himself. Well, even the country doctor with his little bag is no longer the country doctor with his little bag because he depends on a $25 ,000 piece of equipment to do an x -ray if he's going to do a decent diagnosis. So he has to work within the framework of the hospital. That creates another problem of course which both of you are concerned with and that is the possibility of careers in management. We'll probably try to deal with that in one of the in this series somewhere along the line but somewhere along the line you get this intermediary and both of you to some

extent are working in this field and as you know I have an interest in it too. How do you integrate the activities of complex organizations of people where the function of teamwork is there. That changes the whole concept. The individual entrepreneur is pretty much going to I guess in sense of Henry Ford tinkering with his career. I think there certainly has to be a greater training in the human relations aspects. One of the problems we've been constantly facing in the utilization of engineers is that they tend to say well two and two makes four that's the right answer if you don't like it, it's tough. But without taking into account the human factors the desire to understand other people's points of view their background to motivate them. So that the engineer or the scientist more and more has to be people oriented as well as technically oriented. If he's going to get his ideas of cross I'm sure all of us have seen people that were

outstanding technically who just couldn't cooperate who couldn't convince they couldn't motivate. They couldn't persuade they couldn't adapt to a changing situation. On the other hand there are many people who say all right well let's forget the engineer or the technical man the scientist for a management position let's train him purely in the liberal arts. But then we face the other problem that increasingly in business today whether it's the use of the computer in the office function or whether it's the sales manager. He has to understand the technical nature of products which are of increasing complexity of materials of processes he has to as well as the broad economics of a situation. How does the president know whether he should invest another ten million dollars in developing a new product or scrap it and start all over again. So that purely to train a man in in the human relations and the broad arts and without understanding the technical background of business and industry I think short changes him. On the other

hand to train man purely in science and engineering without the human relations and the economic implications of all the things he's doing is also short changing him. So maybe the answer is both a broader based basic education and a continuing education. George suggested one thing that I've been considering and thinking about and that is perhaps in some of the technical fields and I'm just tossing this out. What we probably need is some approach like you're using in law or in medicine where a sort of a pre -training and then his technical training or maybe we could work it out on this suggestion that I had earlier on continuing education in specialized areas where he finds it necessary to in order to understand processes. Let's say he moves up the ladder to a management position. He has to know certain things. Maybe we have sent him back to school to know about those things or do something

that way. Well that's quite common. You find that in many organizations middle management and in fact top management are periodically invited by their organizations to attend various seminars. In many instances to participate in detailed instruction particularly I know of the activity at MIT and at Harvard Business School and a number of others were in men from middle management are subsidized by their companies and attend the full curricula for periods of up to two years on a full time basis. It's simply to become a breast of current technical developments and managerial techniques as well and relationship. So it's happening and it's happening at rather a broad level as well. I would think and let a counselor for let's say a young person seeking a career would have to recognize first that the careers that they're not too predictable is exactly where your opportunities are going to lie. Let's say if we take

a youngster in high school who's what the time he gets into is 50s because of the rapidity of social change. Would you agree with that Stan? I don't think the world is the same as it was when we were in undergraduate school. No, that's true. It certainly has changed a great deal and to prepare these people for a lifetime in one of the present careers is very difficult and perhaps dangerous situation. That's why it seems to me the importance in training people and the basic quantitative techniques of mathematics and basic science so they understand principles and perhaps even more importantly training them in problem solving just how to attack new problems. And how to learn new approaches if we can get people out of their ruts that they tend to dig themselves into this is going to help us a great deal. I think two that there are effects even on the labor union movements. For example, our railroad problem of the elimination of the firemen is in my opinion more acute because we have separate unions for

firemen and engineers and this type of thing whereas if they had a single broad union, these people could be retrained to various jobs that are related and we could absorb a lot of this just by not hiring more people so that the rigid compartmentalization is going to have to break down. The same thing is true in industry too. Well, there's almost a new redefinition of what an occupation is. You don't have a carpenter anymore or you pointed out you don't have a machinist anymore in the sense that you used to be able to define a machinist. He's going to do something quite different than he did or that if he went in a apprentice training is a pretty good example. A man who was trained to be a bricklayer, well now you don't lay bricks anymore. You put up some pre -stressed concrete or use some other device. What's he going to do? We can't just make him obsolescent. Well, I think there needs to be a lot of study in terms of the future needs because

although perhaps we can keep people, older people who are harder to retrain and find it more difficult to make the psychological adjustment in these. There's careers and occupations that are dying out. It's rather tragic to be training a whole new pool of people that won't be able to utilize their resources. You do have, I think, a need though for some thinking and guidance and planning in this area, perhaps by government or educational institutions because the individual faces a bit of it to him if he does all the retraining on his own and sinks the money into it. But this man is apt to be offered a very important job. I think this is one of the problems with this management retraining where they invest a couple of years man sending him back to school. He's so much more desirable to the confeditors then. Well, I think we're going to have to call this off. This is the first of this series that we're going to have on career opportunities. Next Tuesday or next week, I think

we will have, we're going to discuss various fields of activities that we're going to look at. I want to thank you, gentlemen, very much for coming in and at least introducing this series on various careers that people can look forward to. Thank you very much. We're all pleasure. Pleasure. This has been the American scene. Today's discussion, job horizons, head as guests, Stanley M. Block, director of industrial engineering at IIT, and George Phillips, director of management research at IIT. Hosts on the series is Dr. Donald Smithburg, professor of political science at Illinois Tech. The American scene is pre -recorded and is produced by the Illinois Institute of Technology in cooperation with WMAQ. Next week's topic will be job horizons in chemistry, and will be discussed by Dr.

Eva Lusser and Dr. Ruben Batino as we continue our investigation of the American scene. The Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service makes the following announcement, which will be of particular interest to any of you who are not yet citizens of this country, or have friends or relatives who are not citizens. The federal government requires all non -citizens, except those in diplomatic field.