The challenges of upskilling for marginalised workers

When Scott Moore lost his job in 2015, because of budget cutbacks at the university department where he worked, the visually impaired software engineer was not too worried. After a decade’s experience in IT, he considered himself an expert at building websites and apps.

“It was only when I was out there looking for new jobs that I realised I didn’t have the right skills . . . the whole web development field had moved on so fast and I just hadn’t kept up,” he recalls.

Moore, a 54-year-old resident of Denver, Colorado, is one of millions of disabled or financially marginalised adults who find it too hard to access the skills training they need to compete in a tech-dominated workplace.

While upskilling represents a challenge across the labour force, getting up to speed with the latest technology can be particularly difficult for those with limited access to high-quality training, be that for physical or socio-economic reasons.

But Arezou Harraf, founder of Learn & Evolve, a private mentorship provider, says the difficulty can be overcome. “By addressing financial barriers, improving access to information, leveraging technology, and fostering collaborative efforts, we can bridge the skills gap and create a more inclusive workforce,” she argues.

High on Harraf’s list of interventions is the leveraging of existing technology and digital platforms to democratise upskilling. Theoretically, it should be a quick win. Accessing material online removes the costly and sometimes physically challenging requirement to travel to a place of learning.

Yet accessibility alone is no silver bullet, experts warn. Scott Moore’s experience is telling. For a number of years after losing his job, he would spend his days watching video classes about computer programming on platforms such as YouTube and Udemy.com, but to little avail.

Good as it was to “feel like I was learning something”, he reflects, his efforts at self-learning didn’t always fit with the new-look labour market: “I realised I didn’t have any direction and I wasn’t even sure what the most important things to learn would be.”

In Moore’s case, a six-month “coding boot camp” at the University of Denver provided the orientation that he was missing, and enabled him to graduate in April 2022 with a solid command of full-stack JavaScript programming — one of the main programming languages.

Even with the right course, however, upskilling for marginalised groups is not without its difficulties. As Harraf notes, without financial support from the government or employers, funding can present a “significant obstacle”.

Good practices can be found, though. Elizabeth Crofoot, a senior economist at the labour market analytics company, Lightcast, points to the free upskilling programmes tailored especially for people with disabilities that are run by tech groups including IBM and Microsoft.

Sometimes, small tweaks are all that are needed to counter exclusion. Ensuring that work experience and apprenticeships are fairly remunerated, for example, can be the difference between individuals from low-income backgrounds accepting such an opportunity or missing out.

In addition, creative use of the latest digital tech can enable training to take place while doing a job. Crofoot gives the example of the generative artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT enabling neurodiverse individuals to improve their soft skills when at work.

“People with neurological disorders are often very high functioning; they just need a little additional social help,” she says. “For someone like that, they could put an email into ChatGPT and ask it if the message sounds correct, say, or if the social cues are acceptable.”

In a similar way, the UK careers specialist Hundo deploys digital technologies to offer virtual work experience opportunities, with a particular focus on young people facing educational, geographic or socio-economic barriers. 

And, whatever the upskilling intervention may be, the earlier it comes, the better. Working age, ironically, might be too late for some. In the US, for instance, one in three students with disabilities fail to graduate from high-school — compared with just one in six non-disabled students.

For Justin van Fleet, president of the UK-based children’s charity Theirworld and chief executive of the Global Business Coalition for Education, even waiting until secondary school is cutting it fine.

He says this is especially true for the soft skills demanded by modern employers such as critical thinking, teamwork, and appreciation for diverse perspectives.

“These are not skills that can be easily taught to an 18-year-old, but instead [they are] skills and values that are instilled very early on, arguably before the age of five when 90 per cent of an individual’s brain development takes place,” says van Fleet. 

But, even to those disadvantaged workers with good soft skills, today’s digital workplace can be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, by facilitating at-home working and other forms of digital-enabled collaboration, it removes many traditional barriers to employment. On the other hand, by ratcheting up the importance of digital competencies, it further excludes those already facing learning disadvantages.

Scott Moore understands this tension only too well. Three years on from graduating, he is still looking for work. But, as a former judo Paralympian, he’s not one to give up easily. “It’s difficult to keep up,” he concedes, “but you’ve just got to really stay after it.”