The future looks grim for many people today with economies still reeling from the effects of the pandemic. Rapid automation of routine and repetitive tasks are accelerating across different sectors to reduce business costs and improve productivity. From truck driving to warehouse stocking or even operating an F and B outlet, many jobs are at risk of elimination by machines. This is further exacerbated by the pandemic which has accelerated many organization’s automation trajectories. A recent study from Forrester estimated that 10% of U.S. jobs would be automated this year, and another from McKinsey estimates that close to half of all U.S. jobs may be automated in the next decade. We opine that likely only 2 essential skillsets and characteristics would remain essential yet difficult to automate:-
1) Emotions. Emotions play a significant role in all sorts of non-verbal communication and helps an organization prioritise what is necessary. It is complex, nuanced and interacts with our decision making processes. Whilst efforts have been made scientifically to automate this aspect, we opine that it would take decades before emotions can be built into an automated system.
2) Strategic Context. Context is particularly interesting because it is open ended. Every instance there is news, the context in which we operate changes. This has exacerbated with the number of black swan events increasing over the last few years, e.g. Presidential elections, pandemics, amongst others. These changes in context not just changes how established parameters interacts with one another but introduces new parameters that that fundamentally requires modifications to the strategies and operations of an organization and survival often hinges on the organization’s ability to adapt rapidly to these contextual changes. Machine learning, which operates on data sets that by definition were created previously in a different context, therefore poses a challenge to automation.
What then does this mean for the future workforce? Our ability beyond the basic skillsets to manipulate technology, which includes managing and harnessing emotions; and to take into account the effects of context are key ingredients of critical thinking, creative problem solving, effective communication, adaptive learning, and good judgment. Developing new teaching methodologies beyond the hard skills (teaching students to code) but also the skillsets that are hardest to systematise and understand would be the key to developing people who would be highly sought after by future organisations.
Author: Research Room