Recently, Melbourne’s community television station Channel 31 was in a fight for its life. As a board member, it was a time of intensive activity and lobbying as we sought to extend the station’s free to air licence.
In Australia, our service industries are very heavy on entry level and highly skilled jobs which are increasingly making up a large portion of Australia's economy. The challenge is that without training and jobs available, it becomes very challenging for people to climb the ladder of opportunity. It’s a big leap from the bottom to the top without clawing one’s way through the middle.
This year, my professional development has happened in the form of theWomen on Boards WOBSXcourse. It’s a director-led peer-to-peer support program that accelerates women into ASX board roles and with COVID-19. Here are three learnings from being forced to shift sessions online.
Firstly and to be clear – we are not all about to lose our jobs to robots. It's a preposterous assertion. I think the biggest challenge in this is that people cannot see what's ahead and uncertainty makes them fearful. Plus it’s not themselves they’re worried about. Most people feel like they’ll be ok with change – they can re-skill or adapt, but they’re worried about their father or their neighbour or their colleague, who might not have their own flexibility and willingness to change.
What I do know is that if you say Australia is the lucky country; it's not a compliment. It was designed as an insult and our nation co-opting and lazily re-framing the phrase as a compliment, if anything, only proves Horne’s point.