How Automation will affect jobs, skills, and wages?

As the nature of work changes with automation, millions of people may need to switch jobs and acquire new skills. It is predicted, automation will displace many jobs over the next 10 to 15 years, but many others will be created and even more, will change. In the future, jobs will require different skills and may even have higher education or skills requirements. In this article, we will discuss that, how we can retrain workers for the upcoming change and what the shifts might mean for occupations & wages.

Jobs lost or jobs gained?

Workforce transitions in a time of automation. One of the major findings of a report is that between 70 million and 380 million people around the world may need to change their chosen job categories and acquire new skills to survive in the industry, by the year 2030.

Will there be enough jobs in the future?

We looked at six different factors that could significantly increase the demand for human labor even for those activities that might be automated. They include the following:

1. With rising incomes or rising prosperity around the world. We will have another one billion people entering the consuming class in the next couple of decades.
2. Aging around the world. This will lead to the need for additional labor in healthcare, for instance.
3. The need to develop and deploy technologies. Digitization, automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence—these actually require people.
4. Investment in infrastructures, such as real estate, buildings, and bridges. All that construction would be going to increase the need for human demand.
5. Changes in the energy mix. We’ll have smart grids. We’ll need to change the generation of energy.
6. Decreasing amounts of unpaid labor in the global workforce. This is, in many cases, domestic work that’s often done by women, whether it’s childcare, cleaning, cooking, etc. More and more of that could enter the market as well.

We look at the net of that—all of the potential jobs lost, those things that machines might take over, and the potential jobs gained—and the additional demand for human labor that can come from these seven factors. We know we can’t predict the future completely. We do think those six factors of additional labor demand are very important. We started with a list of several factors and filtered down to the ones that we thought would be the most significant. But we also know, we can’t imagine every job that could possibly be developed.

For example, right now we have a bunch of people whose job is to be an app developer for smart phones. This isn’t a job that anyone necessarily imagined a couple of decades ago. In fact, there’s an academic research report that says around half of 1 percent of jobs created every year is entirely new. By 2030, we could be looking at another 8 to 9 percent of jobs in that time period that simply doesn’t exist today.

Many more new jobs and new types of career options might get generated. It’s starting and could change over time depending on how innovative the economy is and how much we invest in innovation and research development. It’s important to note that the seven factors that we looked at; they aren’t all the sources of future labor demand. For example, we don’t use a dynamic model that takes into account the fact that when somebody gets a job, they then go out and start to spend money on all sorts of goods and services. That indeed creates other jobs.

Let’s look at what this actually means for some specific occupations. On the one side, what jobs may decline because of these trends? On the other hand, what kind of jobs may grow because of them? This is a big fear out there right now—that the robots are coming. They’re going to take all the jobs. There’s going to be nothing for people to do. In fact, statistics show quite convincingly that the problem is not if there will there be jobs. There is a big question about will the workers today, given their existing skill sets, be qualified to get the jobs that that will be there. Where do we see job growth? It depends very much on the country you’re looking at. In developing countries that are growing rapidly, there is job growth across virtually all platforms. And there will be demand for all sorts of different types of labor.

SKILLSertifika is the leading Organization that is trying to bridge between the existing skillset of candidates & skills required to match the market demand for today as well as emerging technologies and growing jobs.