Fear Is Okay, Complacency Kills Jobs

https://marketingforbes.com/general/rn-jobs-near-me/ The collision of demographic changes, the rapid spread of automation and rising income inequality will have the potential to trigger an unparalleled major economic and employment disruption far greater than we have ever experienced. Understanding and planning for these inevitable disruptions will be vital when future-proofing jobs.

In fact, there’s a total of 62 challenges workers are facing in their workplaces.

People don’t plan to fail. They just fail to plan and future proof themselves for the inevitable.

While fear is a normal human emotion and may paralyze us from taking action, it’s complacency that will ultimately kill them and their jobs.

We, therefore, have to constantly pay attention to what’s going on around us. We have to be vigilant, flexible and adapting to landscapes that are constantly changing and shifting.

Fear mongering sells

Every day, we read about robots taking over our jobs.

“Will robots take my job?”

“The robots are coming for your jobs.”

“Robots will steal your job.”

“Robots are the ultimate job stealers.”

We also come across findings from Gallop which found that in the U.S.:

1. 58% say new technology is the greater threat to jobs.
2. 23% worry that they may lose their jobs to technology.
3. 76% say artificial intelligence will change the way people work and live.
4. 73% say artificial intelligence adoption will result in net job loss.

Just like there is no one property market in any one country, there’s also not one single conclusion that we can derive from the threat of automation, technology, and artificial intelligence.

It should be noted that predictions of widespread job destruction could be overstated by many especially when we take demographics, economics, income inequality and job creation into account.

There are limiting factors to automation

Let’s be clear.

https://buyyaro.com/ Each country, each geographical location, and each job market and industry is very different. Demographics are different. Economic growth is different. Organizations are very different.

To say that robots will be taking over our jobs is not that true, yet.

(For the purposes of this article, I have used the term “automation” to include robotics, artificial intelligence, and all things technology.)

There is a cost involved in deploying technologies. Organizations need to be able to quantify and justify the benefits over the cost of investing in any technological solutions. While it is easy to say that automation will take over our jobs, the cost of doing so may be too prohibitive for some organizations.

Depending on the country and geographical location, organizations may not be able to justify the huge monetary investment in technologies, yet. ‘Cheap’ labor may be in abundance. Access to capital and technology may be difficult. Access to people skills to deploy and maintain new technologies may not be present.

McKinsey has said that automation will not happen overnight. For them, there are five key factors that will influence the pace and extent of its adoption:

1. The technology must be feasible and it is invented, integrated and adapted into solutions that can automate specific activities.
2. The cost of developing and deploying solutions must not be prohibitive.
3. Labor market dynamics including the supply and demand and the costs of human labor can present an alternative to automation.
4. Whether these new technologies have tangible economic benefits that could be translated into higher throughput, increased quality, and labor cost savings.
5. Whether the technology has regulatory and social acceptance that makes business sense.

McKinsey also noted that while the impact of automation might be slower at the macro level within entire sectors or economies, they could be faster at a micro level.

This is where an individual worker’s activities could be automated quickly. Or organizations may use automation to overcome possible disruption caused by their competitors.

In short, there are certain limiting factors that may prevent automation from being deployed in mass and ultimately take over our jobs.

Job losses due to automation are inevitable

Whether we like it or not, we know that automation is here to stay. It’s inevitable. It’s a question of degree or level of impact.

How automation impact each one of us will depend on our unique circumstances in the country we live in and how well prepared are we.

Humans have embraced automation since creation. We have been transformed by automation; from agriculture to an industrial age, from industrial to information age, and from information to services.

In fact, we cannot get enough of the latest gadgets, latest iPhone, latest TVs, etc. We constantly fill our lives with the latest technologies.

With Apple’s Home pod, Amazon’s Echo (Alexa) and Google’s Home, voice technology is only going to grow. Kids today can simply command Alexa or Apple’s Siri to answer various questions.

It’s no surprise that we will always be embracing technological advances and inviting them into our lives.

So, what’s different in our work lives?

Don’t be surprised that automation will penetrate our work lives even more and will fully transform or recreate the work we do.

We know that there’s always the danger of automation on jobs.

Here’s the good news. History shows that new technologies have always increased the number of jobs.

And the bad news. Technology always hurts as recognizable jobs are destroyed and new ones are created. Some jobs are yet to be conceived. It’s a question of when not if.

McKinsey estimated that 375 million people globally will need to be retrained to learn entirely new occupations. It means that people in mid-careers with children, mortgages, families, and financial obligations, will need retraining.

This retraining is not going to be measured in years. It’s not going to be feasible for many of these people to go back to universities for two-year degrees.

The challenge is to retrain people in mid-careers on a large scale and help them learn new skills to match employable jobs in growing occupations in places where they live.