Upskilling as Fiction

An example that keeps coming up. A company automates its warehouse management. The employees who had been counting inventory and sorting goods are retrained. They’re now supposed to do strategic logistics. Optimize supply chains. Interpret data analyses. Make decisions that were previously made by managers. The industry calls that upskilling.

I read the paragraph three times. Not because it’s complicated. But because the matter-of-factness with which it’s written left me speechless.

People who did physical work for years are now supposed to think strategically. Not because they want to. Not because they can. But because their previous work was taken over by a machine and something has to happen with them.

Upskilling sounds like moving up. More responsibility, more pay, more status. In practice it often means: you lose the job you were good at and get one you’re not. The old job had clear procedures, physical work, visible results. At the end of the day you could see what you’d done. The new job has screens, spreadsheets, meetings, and the permanent uncertainty of whether you understand what you’re doing.

Nobody asks whether these people want this. And nobody asks whether they can do it.

Those are two different questions, and neither gets asked.

The first: Want. There are people who chose physical work. Not for lack of alternatives. But because they’re good at it and because they like it. Because it’s satisfying to see an organized warehouse at the end of the day. Because working with your hands produces a kind of pride that doesn’t appear in any job description. These people are now put in front of a screen and expected to be grateful.

The second: Can. Strategic thinking is not a skill you learn in a three-day seminar. It’s a way of thinking that develops over years. Some people have it. Others don’t. Not because one group is smarter than the other, but because there are different kinds of intelligence. Someone who carries the entire warehouse in their head, knows every position, senses shortages before they show up in the numbers, has an ability no course can teach. But that ability no longer counts. What counts is the ability the new job demands. And if you don’t have it, you have a problem, not the plan.

These examples are always presented as success stories. The employees were empowered. The transformation succeeded. There’s nothing about how many gave up along the way. How many, after retraining, do work they don’t understand and that doesn’t fulfill them. How many go home and wonder what happened to their profession.

In consulting they call this redeployment. It means: we no longer need you for what we hired you for. But we’re not firing you. We’ll give you something else. That sounds humane. In practice it’s often a slow farewell. The employee realizes they can’t keep up in the new job. They lose confidence. They function. But they no longer live in their work.

The honest version would have been: We automated jobs. Some of the affected people were able to adapt. Others weren’t. For the others we didn’t have a plan that actually worked. Upskilling worked for some, and for others it was a polite form of overwhelm.

That’s said nowhere. Because honesty is not a success story you put in a PowerPoint.

The word upskilling suggests a direction: upward. More capability. More worth. More future. What it conceals is that for some people the direction doesn’t lead upward, it leads away. Away from what they were good at. Away from what gave them meaning. Into a future that was designed for them, but not with them.