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

I was extremely humbled at the number of comments I got across various social media platforms. Interestingly, it was a rough 30:70 split between those who don’t see a reason to worry and those who do! My intention was not create panic, but to set in motion a dialogue process on jobs, which is a topic of grave concern in some of the more mature and large emerging geographies already.
I would like to divide my solutions into 3 parts:

Part A: Government sponsored programmes targeting entrepreneurship within agriculture

Part B: Government, Schools and Corporate led up-skill programme for those who are engaged in manual/repetitive tasks

Part C: Corporate R&D centres aimed at not only doing R&D, but also on investing in building skills that people would require in 5/10 years

Part A: Government sponsored programmes targeting entrepreneurship within agriculture

As awareness increases, we will see a dire need for organic produce and real farm food over all the cans and tins we consume today. It’s a cycle and as the world gets more conscious, this demand is going to increase again. It is pretty much going back to the basics. But, today such produce remains expensive and contributes a miniscule portion. This is driven by 2 factors – (1) Agriculture in emerging markets is still limited to largely the uneducated or undereducated (2) Agriculture is not “cool enough” as a profession

The lack of sufficient use of technology in agriculture has made it un-attractive for too long. Significant under-investment in irrigation, market pricing, marketing and supply-chain has rendered it a simply unviable profession for many. For instance, 50% of India depends on agriculture, yet less than 20% of our GDP comes from agriculture. While in more mature economies like the US, only 3% of the people depend on agriculture, but contribute almost 10% of their GDP.

In my view, this will happen only if government heavily invests and sponsors disruption within agriculture across the industry to make it “sexy” and “viable” for young professionals. We see FinTech festivals, how many AgriTech festivals have we seen?

20 years from, some of the “coding” generation may run out of codes and their fascination behind it. They may find excitement in nature and what it offers as a business opportunity!

Part B: Government, Schools and Corporate led up-skill programme for those who are engaged in manual/repetitive tasks

We need a massive up-skilling/re-skilling programme targeting middle aged individuals who are engaged in manual/repetitive tasks. A key part of the services industry ecosystem, are the massive number of people who depend on manual tasks for their bread and butter. And many of these tasks are primed for disruption and extinction in light of automation over the next 1-2 decades depending on which country we are talking about.

We need to create “Back to school” programmes like the one currently being explored in China to get employees proactively into class-rooms and re-train them around either new age skillsets like coding or new industries. This will require intervention at never before seen levels!

Part C: Corporate R&D centres aimed at not only doing R&D, but also on investing in building skills that people would require in 5/10 years

Large conglomerates and organisations needs to heavily invest in re-building their employee base keeping in mind medium to long term future. For e.g. do we need to build a large contact centre team to take standard calls or do we need to train them to be real Advisors to only handle high-end calls?

These centres need to aim at being the disruption engine from within to thwart what otherwise new entrants would anyways. I.e. fundamentally transform the business model. This will help define the skill-sets we need to acquire and build over the next decade.

Funding a once a life-time transformation of unmatched proportion

To invest the kind of money these schemes would require and to reduce social inequality emanating from the impending job crisis (no jobs to jobs not being commensurate to the skillsets acquired), I recommend a period of “wealth tax” for individuals and “automation tax” for corporates. Some may call me out for sounding like a socialist. I am far away from being one. But, we need to address the societal imbalance and hence, I am a firm believer in Bernie Sanders and his “wealth tax” model for a certain period of time. Further, like some schemes we have around “Plant a new tree for every tree we cut”, we should introduce an “automation” tax. This will amount will help build a pool to drive the large scale up-skilling/re-skilling programmes we would need to execute over the next 1-2 decades.

Further, we can explore long-term government backed education bonds to fund some of the larger scale projects which have clearer ROIs

I refuse to believe funds is the issue. Key challenges impacting dynamic changes to our job environment is lack of execution, foresight and government will to take up a topic that may not reap instant results.

Finally, there would be millions of new jobs created across various new fields and this article doesn’t aim to list what they could be. For e.g. Who would have thought someone would get paid 5 and 6 figures for posting messages on their social media feeds even a decade back, when Facebook didn’t even exist. Time moves very fast and hence, the process is more important than what jobs would be created.