Unlike the 1900s, staff in retail outlets do not spend hours in maintaining account register post office hours. Technology and automation have made life simpler for employees across different sectors.
Be it the supermarket cashiers or travel agents, jobs that were considered mainstream are vanishing rapidly. Automation has certainly taken away a large number of jobs. A report by McKinsey Global Institute predicts that over 800 million jobs will be lost to automation by 2030. As far as India is concerned, 5.7 crore jobs will be displaced by automation.
The employment picture is constantly changing the nature of jobs. New industries have emerged in recent years, creating jobs that did not exist a decade ago. YouTube content creators, social media managers, data scientists and many more job roles have been created in the last few years.
India is the most prominent example of this trend. Tech startups are creating new growth opportunities for other sectors in India. Automation may have taken away a significant section of jobs, but it has even created new areas such as cybersecurity, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning etc.
While it is true that millions of jobs will be lost to automation, one cannot ignore the new jobs that will get created due to advancements in tech. Nasscom has identified 55 new job roles and 155 new-age skills that will be required in the future. Big data and analytics are major areas that are expected to grow eight fold by 2025.
Data made public by Kelly Services, an HR firm shows a 15% increase in hospitality, 8% increase of jobs in retail, and 18% reduction in IT jobs in 2017. IT firms are re-skilling their existing workforce to meet demands of the rapidly changing requirement.
Clarissa Shen, Udacity’s COO said, “People should reskill themselves and go after new opportunities. As a company, we do not want to be complacent and we want to tell people that they can succeed by learning. I have great examples the largest telecom provider in India,kids picked up Udacity courses in free Wifi zones in their stores, picked up on skills and ultimately changed their lives by getting engineering jobs that finally helped their families.”
Tech innovation is spurring jobs than destroying them. The need to re-skill is a reality that most people need to accept.