The focus is now on people, not bins.

The charity requires donors to bring old clothing and household items to its centres, not just for efficiency, but to make contact with employees who are also Goodwill “clients.”

The 80-year-old organization is focussing on skills of the future, and how human skills can position socially disadvantaged youth for a very different world of work.

Hand-outs have given way to hands-on.

I visited Goodwill Ontario last week in London, Ontario with RBC CEO Dave McKay, to see how work-integrated learning can help youth from all backgrounds prepare for a changing economy. Too often when we talk about work-integrated learning, we focus on co-op students moving into the tech sector or apprentices training for major construction projects.

At Goodwill, they’re working with people like Mo, a single mother who is learning and working in the organization’s streetfront cafe, to develop skills for the hospitality sector. Or Alberto, who emigrated from Colombia and is building a green coffee importing business. Or Lela, an indigenous woman who left school in her teens and has since gained the education and skills to be a home care worker.

They call it “the power of work.”

Goodwill Ontario has gone from 300 employees to 700 in about seven years, as it sharpens its focus on training. Across North America, it has 130,000 employees and has built itself up to be a $5.87 billion social enterprise.

Many of those employees don’t have the formal credentials to pass a typical HR screen. Or they’ve never learned how to craft a resume or make eye contact in a job interview.

Most also lack that first job requirement that companies often demand before a candidate gets to first base. It’s the “no experience, no job” dilemma, and a key reason why there are nearly one million Canadian youth not in employment, education or training.

To help youth transition into the workplace, Goodwill’s programs focus on more than technical skills. They aim to develop the cultural fluency of work, through four key values:

• a willingness to work;
• a respect for other;
• a strong sense of self;
• a life plan.

As Canada develops a skills plan for the 2020s, and the age of automation, we should remind ourselves that work requires more than a skill. Social aptitudes, and resilience, are just as critical.

And work is about more than a paycheque. It’s a form of identity, and belonging. We can’t automate that.

Mike McNamara, whose company Flex makes many of the world’s phones, can’t find or train enough skilled workers to keep pace with advances in digital technology and electronics.

A few years ago, the typical smartphone consisted of 800 parts. Today, that number is 3,000 — and the human skills needed to put it all together are growing exponentially.

“We’ve been talking about automation taking away everyone’s job for years, and yet I see the unemployment rate going down,” McNamara told the Milken Institute’s MI Global conference in Los Angeles.

As one of the world’s largest contract manufacturers, Flex needs to automate as the demands on manufacturing grow — and it needs to add more people to make the automation work.

“You can’t get there without automation,” McNamara said. “It’s almost necessary for the work to be done.”

The skills revolution was centre stage at Milken, as investors, executives and government leaders tried to come to grips with the whiplash of technology and labour force disruption.

Is it transition or transformation?

Royal Bank of Canada CEO Dave McKay told the audience that 50 years after the advent of ATMs, banks are employing more people than ever. For vastly different needs.

“There’s not a lot of artificial intelligence,” he said. “There’s human intelligence. We’re teaching machines.”

Trouble is, much of the workforce is not ready to work with advanced machines.

In the U.S., only 35% of adults under the age of 35 have a college degree. Chuck Schumer, the Democrat’s minority leader in the Senate, pointed to upstate New York where there’s a “desperate shortage” of blue collar workers like welders.

Among the challenges: welders increasingly need algebra to work with new technology.

The skills mismatch is one reason there are 6.5 million unfilled jobs in the U.S., and many are skeptical about the ability of traditional schools to lead the transition.

McNamara said Flex, which employs 200,000 people globally, can’t find enough workers in many countries. And the younger employees it recruits want to work with advanced machines, but need training as soon as they join the company.

McKay told the Milken crowd about Canada’s approach to work-integrated learning through apprenticeships, co-ops and internships, and a commitment by the country’s leading employers and post-secondary schools to create such opportunities for every undergraduate student. He called the approach “the great democratizer,” giving students a direct path into the workplace regardless of background.

Canada is also exploring more ambitious approaches to life-long learning, to help mid-career workers develop new skills.

“There’s anxiety. The journey will be difficult,” McKay said.

He warned business and government to expect more populist movements if they fail to create clearer pathways for employees facing disruption. And he urged employers to be honest about the challenges.

“Change is not a threat when you feel in control,” he said. “That’s why we’re seeing the rise of populism, because people don’t feel they have control.”

In the coming decade, half of all jobs will be disrupted by technology and automation. Some will change dramatically. Others will disappear completely, replaced by jobs that are yet to be invented.

We are living through an era of radical change, with the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and automation transforming the way we work, even in unexpected fields such as law and customer service.

How will we prepare Canadian youth for the workplace of the future?

We discovered that the four million Canadian youth entering the workforce over the next decade are going to need a foundation of skills that sets them up for many different jobs and roles rather than a single career path. They will need a portfolio of human skills such as critical thinking, social perceptiveness, and complex problem solving to remain competitive and resilient in the labour market.

We found that Canada is shifting from a jobs economy to a skills economy, and yet employers, educators and policy makers are not prepared. Here are four things you need to know about the coming skills revolution and the future of work.

Disruption Is Accelerating

It used to be that the threat of automation was only for routine, repetitive forms of work such as assembly lines. Now, algorithms are building legal cases, replacing administrative assistants and taking customer service calls for major corporations. We’ve dealt with technology replacing jobs before, but this time it’s different.

More than a quarter of Canadian jobs will be heavily disrupted by automation in the next decade, and half will require a new mix of skills even if the job title stays the same.

That doesn’t mean those jobs are going away. The Canadian economy will create 2.4-million new jobs between now and 2021 — but almost all of them will require a different approach. The economy will be built on a mobile workforce, constantly learning, training and upgrading to meet the demands of a changing world.

Flexibility Is the Future

Change is coming fast, making it hard to know what jobs will look like a decade from now. We need a new way of thinking about job requirements. Developing human skills — things like critical thinking, judgment, and decision making — will empower young people to pivot between careers and across sectors even as job descriptions change.

We analyzed data on hundreds of different occupations and found that many jobs, even in disparate fields, are connected by a set of foundational skills. We grouped jobs based on similar skills into six clusters. By focusing on the skills required, it is surprisingly easy to pivot between seemingly unconnected roles. Musicians and paramedics might not seem to have a lot in common, but both jobs require high levels of focus, excellent analytical skills and attention to detail. It takes upgrading only four skills for someone to transition from dental assistant to graphic designer.

Of course, many transitions require investment in terms of time and money, but this presents an opportunity for educators and policymakers to offer new approaches to training and development.

Digital Literacy Is Essential

Digital fluency will be essential to all new jobs. This does not mean we all need to code like a Silicon Valley programmer. It’s an understanding of technology, of how to interact with computers, smartphones and whatever comes next, that will be essential. Soon, we will come to think about digital literacy like we do regular literacy: a prerequisite for nearly any job.

We Need to Prepare for the Future of Work

Job disruption is one of the most pressing problems facing Canada today. Without the right people and the right skills, the economy won’t work. If we can get Canadians, especially young Canadians, to tap into these skills foundations, our economy will be ready for the skills transition.

We need schools to teach and certify skills, governments to develop programs that support lifelong learning, and companies to hire for core skills over credentials. By building skillsets that allow them to move from job to job, young Canadians will be able to take advantage in a new economy where it doesn’t matter what you’ve done — it matters what you can do.

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Attention all Youth – Learn how you can be better prepared for the changing world of work.

RBC was there, talking to some of the 1000+ young people in attendance, about what the former first lady — and her powerful message of equality and change — meant to them and their generation.

A truly unforgettable experience for youth from across Canada, Obama spoke from the heart about resilience, education and equality for girls, and left the audience feeling empowered and ready to be a generation of difference makers.