Report (Part 4): Third World Summit on the Internet and Multimedia

The Multimedia Industry and Employment: Trends and Issues

Time: 10 October 2002, 14:00-16:00 Location: A 400 Chair: Richard Pearson (Executive Director, Institute of Employment Studies, UK) Presenters/ Participants: Duncan Campbell (Head of Employment Strategy Department, International Labour Organisation, Switzerland)
Li Jian Ping (Vice Chairman, Shangai Multimedia Industry Association, China)
Herve Lhoumeau (General Secretary, Aquitaine Multimedia, France)
Gerhard Rohde (Head of Department, Union Network International, Germany)
Gerardo Brenes Trejos (President, International Global Business Systems, Costa Rica) Reporter: Danielle Dalsoren, Claire Chombeau (ICVolunteers) Languages: English/French Key words: Digital divide, socio-economic impact, ICT, IT, multimedia, employment, human resources

This roundtable focused on specific activity sectors among which human resource development and training, supply and demand for specific software and technical skills, the brain drain and its effect on emerging multimedia markets, women and multimedia employment and labor relations in the industry. 

The panelist provided examples on how a concerted effort at national and international levels can facilitate the preparedness of the multimedia industry worldwide in its objective to respond to the technical and employment challenges ahead. Other issues of interest include also skills specialization, flexibility of time and place for freelancers, outplacement, national systems for multimedia training, quality of education and training, training diplomas, standardization of profiles, university degrees vs. patchwork careers, on-the-job training vs. school qualification.

Mr. Duncan Campbell, Head of Employment Strategy Department, International Labour Organization (UK), pointed out that ICT has led to many changes in employment characteristics. For example, ICT has increased the number of atypical employment contracts. Atypical contracts have been shown to cause a stress-inducing work environment, with tighter deadlines and higher work speed. Mr. Campbell detailed several other specific, often contrasting, quality of work issues that ICT brings about:

Positive

• Higher rate of job creation
• Sometimes leads to skill upgrading
• Increases pay for some
• Increases freedom and flexibility, gains in time
• New kind of contracts
• Interconnect people
• Develop creativity

Negative

• Higher rate of job destruction
• Leads to skill downgrading
• Reduces pay
• Isolates people
• Intensifies work and stress
• Puts privacy, intellectual property rights at risk
• Weakens social protection, employment contracts (less job security)
• Gender, age segmentation (most people at the low-end ICT jobs are women)
• Blurs work and non-work

For developing countries, ICT provide: 

• Access to the world market
• Less entry barriers
• Intangible work
• Increase productivity in the traditional industry
• Develop education

Mr. Campbell warned that the overall impact of ICT on employment has been a decrease in quality of work issues.

Mr. Li Jian Ping, Vice Chairman of Shanghai Multimedia Association (China) introduced some interesting facts regarding Shanghai. With a population of 13 million and over 2,000 multimedia companies, the city is the biggest economic centre in China and surely a force in the multimedia industry. Mr. Ping detailed the main activities of Shanghai's multimedia industry: manufacturing based on computer graphics and processing, multimedia for web applications and multimedia devices. Executives, project managers and processing professionals for multimedia are therefore in demand. The institutions working to fulfill this demand are universities, institutes and training companies, as well as the SMIA. Mr. Ping related SMIA's main goals: to coordinate with the government and other organizations, to help meet the multimedia industry's human resource requirements, to push schools and training companies to provide multimedia education, to provide on-the-job training for multimedia and to share experience and increase international cooperation.

Mr. Gerardo Brenes Trejos, President, International Global Business Systems (Costa Rica), spoke about the training and retention of IT talent from the Costa Rican perspective. He first gave some reasons why many Costa Ricans do not return home after training abroad: that they may prefer the money, quality of life, loss of commitment, leadership style or the greater research and development funds available abroad. He then posed some options for trying to attract IT talent to Costa Rica: by improving business leadership issues, labor climate, management systems, organizational structure and compensation systems. He also emphasized the need to increase the participation of female professionals in the multimedia field. Costa Rica's efforts to accomplish those tasks are being undertaken by the private and public sector. Capsoft's "pro-software" program (Costa Rica Chamber of Software Developers) is one such effort. Efforts to reduce the IT expertise shortage may also include hiring foreign professionals, contracting services with companies located overseas, adding more computer related knowledge in the study programs at primary and high school, promoting IT related careers among high school students and training professionals from other disciplines in IT.
Mr. Brenes ended his presentation by saying that developed countries should assist developing countries with IT training in order to expand their own markets, and because there is an estimated deficit of one million IT workers in Europe.

Mr Pearson, Executive Director of the Institute of Employment Studies, UK, presented a short history of his institution, founded in 1969. It is a non-for-profit Institute and has associates in over 10 countries. It conducts research and consultancy in the following fields: 

• Resourcing, reward and motivation
• Education, training and learning
• Skills, labor market and mobility
• Social exclusion

IES also works with the multimedia industry by:

• ICT skills supply and demand
• Brain drain and mobility of people
• Mobility of ICT jobs
• E learning, e recruitment, e HR

Diverse sectors include arts and culture, entertainment and games, media and publishing, education and training, health, business services and communications. It includes both small and bigger entities: self-employment, SMEs, corporations, education and training, public sector and clusters and networks. Some key employment issues are:

• Skill development
• Regulation, freedom and rights
• Information to support individuals, employers, trainers, public policy
• Equity and equality
• Globalization

Mr. Rhode, Department Head of the Union Network International (UNI), Germany, introduced the Union, a 15-million strong international organization offering professional and private services. UNI was founded on the eve of the new millennium and was dealing with the newly redefined field of information and communication technologies, bringing together previously very distinct industries. 
UNI's members cover a range of activities, including writing the scripts, developing the content who write the software code, burning CD-ROMs, producing, promoting and selling the multimedia products. They also share the pains and problems, which are accompanying the ups and downs of the industry, when they suffer the effects of insecure employment, of stressful working environments, of inadequate vocational training opportunities and the fear of redundancy. 
Mr. Rhode pointed out that just like many other sectors the multimedia industry has been suffering from the economic downturn and the dot.com disaster. It is still fairly young and so is average age of its staff. Now many of those young multimedia talents have gone back to university and resumed their studies to not be kicked out first in crisis period.
He further stressed that what was necessary for the sector, as it is becoming more sophisticated, is a strategic process of professionalisation. This means a cohesive system of vocational university curricula, with inbuilt bridges between the different level to facilitate upward mobility. A system that has to be accompanied by certification program, which allow for international portability of qualification.
According to Mr. Rhode, some of the challenges faced in this new industry are:

• The fact that lifelong training must be seen as having strategic importance;
• The asset base of companies is the skills and knowledge of their workforce;
• New ways of working are to be welcomed (tele-working for example);
• Self-employment identified as a priority issue for the future;
• Stress-related illness is not an individual problem and responsibility but an issue for HR policies;
• The way forward is through social partnership.

Mr. Lhoumeau, General Secretary of Aquitaine Multimedia, France, introduced the company's study that is evaluating the knowledge existing in the multimedia domain in 11 European countries. The aim of the study is to form employees to the needs of the multimedia businesses and to allow the free circulation of the workers. To conduct the study, definitions of jobs have been translated into each European language to create an international vocabulary. Furthermore, tasks in jobs have been defined in order to provide adapted trainings.

Interesting Issues
Information and communications technology (ICT) may have led to an overall decrease in quality of work issues.

Interesting Questions
Mr. Pearson disagreed with Mr. Brenes about the supposed deficit of one million IT workers in Europe. He believes that the numbers had been greatly inflated-that there was an artificial boom in IT demand in the 90's due to the millennium change, leading to a current quiet period, which is exacerbated by the current economic crisis. A member of the audience from Kenya asked Mr. Brenes how IT can reduce poverty in rural communities. Mr. Brenes replied that investing in IT education, from primary school on up, was the key.

Conclusions
ICT/multimedia has both positive and negative consequences: both destroys and creates jobs, provides for more flexibility, causes lifestyles to become more isolated and uncertain, creates a digital divide, changes the volume, distribution and type of jobs. 

Investing in lifelong IT education is essential—it is essential to provide education from an early age, as well as make sure that the older generation receives IT training.

Increased cooperation and collaboration across societies, sectors and nations is both enabled and required by ICT.