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Skill Shift: Automation and the Future of the Workforce
My notes after reading a handful of articles about workplace automation in the near future.
Demand for Workforce Skills
- Machines are getting smarter
- High productivity, GDP growth, performance, propsperity
- People will nee to be more social/emotional - soft skills are more important
- Basic cognitive/physical/manual skills will decline
- “creativity, critical thinking, decision making, and complex information processing, will grow through 2030, by 19 percent in the United States and by 14 percent in Europe, from sizable bases today.”
- Data input tasks will be in the decline, machines can do these
Graphic on Skillset
Shifting skill requirements in five sectors
- Banking/insurance - number crunching jobs will decline
- Social/emootional skills will still be needed for customer interaction
- Energy/mining - Manual work will be displaced as machines can easily run diagnostics, collect data, read metrics
- Healthcare - office support staff will decrease, care providers will increase
- Manufacturing - physical labor decrease, more leadership skills needed
- Retail - predictable manual jobs like driving/packing/stocking will decline as they become productive
- Sensors, robots, automated cashiers, etc.
- Decrease human interaction
Mindshift
- It’ll be a huage mind-set shift for companies
- The way they work will be must faster and more dynamic
- Might be a “new-collar” job that operates in between white and blue
- People who don’t get cut will need to operate at a higher level because a lot of their tasks will be sped up
- “Gig”/sharing economy will increase
Future Workforce
- Retraining - in-house vs. outsourced learning opportunieis
- Redeployment - unbundling/rebundling tasks
- Hiring - sometimes less expensive than retraining
- Europe is much more willing to retrain
- US 35% of respondants said they would simply rehire or mainly rehire
- Europe: 7% would rehire
- Contracting - bring in contractors for very specific knowledge set for noncore/low-skill roles
- Not for “high-skill talent”
- Releasing - reducing work hours of some employees
- Could result in a loss of culture, satisfaction
Sources
Posted in Life with Internship, Reflection