Job opportunities

A thorough reassessment is required of how the company operates and how best to capture the impact of automation.

Companies who have just automated on the surface have had small and limited results that don't last. Companies that have understood and deployed the high-risk, high-reward proposition have completely transformed it's business offerings and have become market leaders. They have also redeployed the freed up workforce and provided additional services, even turning their competitors into customers.

A joint effort of commitment and communication is essential for a thorough approach to automation and has to be led by top management.

Apart from IT, all stakeholder groups like HR, Operations, Business Units have to be engaged, and communicate consistently.

• In 1885, socialist William Morris proposed that in the factories of the future, employees should work only four hours a day.
• In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that advances in technology would lead to an age of leisure where people might work 15 hours a week.
• Since the early 2010s, these ideas have been developed further, creating a growing critique of work as an ideology, and exploring alternatives to work.
• Post-work offers enormous promises: In a life of much less work, life would be calmer, more equal, more communal, more pleasurable, more thoughtful, more politically engaged, more fulfilled.

The work ideology is not natural nor very old.

• Before the modern era, all cultures thought of work as a means to an end, not an end in itself.
• Once the modern work ethic was established, working patterns started to shift. Between 1800 and 1900, the average working week shrank from 80 hours to 60 hours, and in the 1970s to roughly 40 hours.
• In 1979, Bernard Lefkowitz related in his book that people who had given up their jobs reported feelings of "wholeness." During the same period, because wages were high enough, it became possible for most people to work less.
• During the 80s, work ideology was reimposed by aggressively pro-business governments who were motivated by a desire for social control.
• By the early 21st century, the work culture seems inescapable.

“Without urgent and targeted action today, to manage the near-term transition and build a workforce with future-proof skills, governments will have to cope with ever-growing unemployment and inequality, and businesses with a shrinking consumer base.”

Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum.

Automation will do away with most existing jobs but it will also create new ones. Retraining in a massive scale will be necessary. 

In particular, manual laborers are at risk of unemployment in the absence of retraining, as the new jobs will be in more specialized areas. Governments and employers in every sector are being urged to retrain and re-skill workers to avoid a crisis.