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:
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?
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
professionThe 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.
1 comment:
I am excited over point A. Which believe Malaysia is really lagging behind in agriculture. Food shortage and climate crisis will be inevitable in the future. But less Inducement is seen by the government house in this sector in both research and commercial support.
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