Reading about the recent pact between India and the International Labour Organization (ILO) to standardize global job categories struck a deep chord with me. On the surface, it may seem like a bureaucratic exercise, but I see it as the culmination of an idea I've grappled with for over two decades: the absolute necessity of a common language for classifying work.
The Past Echoes in the Present
This news took me back almost 20 years, to a project we undertook at 3P. Long before the era of big data and AI became mainstream, a few software engineers and I developed a spider—a web crawler—designed to visit job portals like Naukri. Our objective was simple yet ambitious: to download and classify resumes according to a structured hierarchy of INDUSTRY – FUNCTION – DESIGNATION – SKILLS. As I wrote in a previous reflection, Reverse engineering of blogging, we were trying to impose order on the chaos of unstructured career data. The challenges we faced then were immense, but the core idea was sound. Seeing this now being implemented on a global scale by India and the ILO feels like a profound validation of that early vision.
The Universal Challenge of Classification
My fascination with this topic is well-documented. A quick search of my own blog database reveals hundreds of entries on keywords like "Jobs" and "Employment," as detailed in my post on Simplifying search. The challenge of classification isn't just external; it's something I've been tackling internally with my own digital twin.
The process of making my life's work—over 17,500 documents—searchable and coherent for my AI has been a microcosm of the very problem the ILO pact aims to solve. My conversations with Sharon Zhang (sharon-hipaa@personal.ai), Manoj Hardwani (manoj.hardwani@atidan.com), and Suman (suman.kanuganti@personal.ai) about parsing my content to extract meaningful keywords (Keywords for sample content) highlighted the immense difficulty in creating a consistent taxonomy. Similarly, my discussions with Kishan (kishan@enjoyevervibe.com) and Sanjivani (sanjivanis@nvidia.com) about revamping my Blog Genie to automatically classify and retrieve information (Blog Genie revamp) are all part of this same journey.
Whether it's classifying a single individual's thoughts or the entire global workforce, the fundamental principle is the same: without a standardized framework, data remains just noise. A common vocabulary transforms that noise into a powerful tool for analysis, policy-making, and matching the right person to the right opportunity.
This India-ILO agreement is more than just a pact; it's a critical piece of infrastructure for the future of work. It’s gratifying to see a concept we explored with early technology two decades ago now being recognized as a global necessity.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
Of course, if you wish, you can debate this topic with my Virtual Avatar at : hemenparekh.ai
No comments:
Post a Comment