Jobs!!! An impending global crisis or a massive opportunity that we are unprepared for? (Part 1 of 2)

Note: This article covers my personal views and does not represent the views of my organisation. Further, it is written from an Asian emerging markets context covering the service industry.

Few Interesting stats to ponder over:

1. 65-85% of job that will be created in next decade do not exist today (multiple sources ranging from Dell to famous books)

2. 70% of tasks will be automated over the next decade (Tasks not jobs)

3. 15% of jobs today would be redundant over the next decade (my own estimate is that this could be much higher if indeed 70% of tasks are automated over the next decade)

4. By 2022, no less than 54% of all employees will require re-skilling/up-skilling (WEF: Future of Jobs Report 2018)

5. By 2022, Emerging professionals share of employment will be up 11% points to 27% and legacy roles will decline 10% to 21% (WEF: Future of Jobs Report 2018)

There are many articles which talk about productivity growth post 1970’s being in extremely low single digits only. I even asked this question at the World Economic Forum in Dalian in 2017 to a high power panel. Professors talked about how many of us were seeing significant growth in more advanced industries. But, in rural based jobs, productivity has actually even declined and hence, the overall numbers weren't very high.

But, there seemed to be a massive consensus that the coming decades would be very different as Industrial revolution 4.0 kicks in. Some of the elements include - digital technology, advances in micro-biology, artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, IoT and so on.

This has been a topic that I have been thinking a lot about. Some time back when I was in an Operations role, with the use of automation, lean and digitalisation of processes, we had made roughly 10% of a department redundant. Most of them were still able to find roles elsewhere in the business as Asia is still a growth market with significant manual processes. But, I can’t stop wondering - how long before those processes are automated as well.

From a business objective perspective, it was pretty significant and value creative for the enterprise. But, from a personal side, it was a very difficult exercise and more importantly with social implications on the type of people who may not be easily employable in today’s world.

During that process, I learnt 3 important elements from this exercise - (1) How unprepared organisations are for this industrial revolution? (2) How unprepared employees are to embrace this change? (3) How unaware leaders and employees are of the extent of change ahead of us.

The recent job report (or the lack of it) in India which has given opposition fodder made me wonder. How can a country that is 1 of the 2 fastest growing economies in the world face a job crisis?

This coupled with my personal experience made me do some soul searching as well as some rigorous research on jobs. Without being accused of scare mongering, I am of the view that we are headed for an impending job crisis that can become an opportunity if the state, corporates and other important players like educational institutions get together and come up with a clear jobs plan. I am not worried about millennials and xillennials as they will find new age jobs based on the skill sets they are acquiring today.

I am more concerned about the sandwich generation, the one that supports their kids and parents. More importantly, those who have been doing manual/semi-manual repetitive tasks and never worried or had the time to acquire new skills are at the biggest risk of losing their current jobs.

My view is that any job that fulfils the below condition would be automated over the next 5-10 yrs:

1. A clear starting and end position

2. Manual and highly repetitive

3. Minimal people interactions

The second wave of automation will also cover more high-end roles that include basic people interaction, analytics and the like. (Next 5-10 yrs for advanced industries and more sequentially for others)

Some of you may wonder if I am being conservative as the second wave is already underway in many industries. That is true. But, I am talking about it from a pan-industrial scale type of transformation and not so much specific companies or sub industries with lower legacy (e.g. eCommerce)

And make no mistake, these are sometimes as much as 50-60% of jobs in most industries. How are we going to employ this many people? What social and economic impact is this going to leave our society with?

Many a time, I keep hearing about using them for more high value tasks as their core tasks get automated. But, how many such high value tasks really exist to gainfully employ these people? And, more importantly how many of these employees can really up-skill themselves to undertake high value tasks?

Instead, many a countries are introducing stricter immigration rules, labour laws around redundancy and so on. These do not solve the root cause. In fact as we see in some of the countries in the middle east, it may actually be counter productive and impacting industries even more.

What we need is serious industry-government dialogue and concerted efforts to build a long-term plan aimed at creating jobs that (A) Helps the economy grow without putting undue social costs on the government exchequer or corporates expense base (2) Employ the massive number of people who would be available over the next decade or so (C) Help Gen X, GenY (Not the cream who already are) to compete or co-exist with millennials in the job force

A starting point is to define what does each country want to be specialise or be known for. For e.g. in the 1990s-2000s, it was IT/ITES for India, led by massive cost arbitrage. With that part dwindling, what will be our USP in 2030?

Happy to hear your views! In the next write up, I will focus on my proposed solutions, potential job spaces and emerging opportunities...