Workers around the world are facing "double disruption": not only is the global workforce automating faster than expected, but the Covid-induced global recession has reversed employment gains, making it even harder for workers, especially those already disadvantaged, to make the transition to new types of jobs.
This is the core message of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2020 Future of Jobs report, a survey of mostly big, white-collar companies across 26 countries.
The bad news is that, in contrast with previous years, job creation is slowing while job destruction is accelerating.
By 2025, the so-called robot revolution is set to disrupt 85-million jobs globally, according to the report. By then the average employer expects to divide tasks roughly equally between humans and machines.
Astonishingly, even half of the lucky ones who retain their jobs will need reskilling. Fortunately, the report finds that 73% of SA firms would look to retrain current staff to meet their changing requirements.
"Of course, it depends on the choices we make today," notes WEF MD Saadia Zahidi. "It depends on the kinds of investments governments make today and the investments workers make in terms of their own time. And it depends on the choices that business leaders make when it comes to retaining and protecting jobs vs shorter-term decisions that are more focused on quarterly results."
The report warns that in the absence of support from governments and employers, inequality is likely to worsen because of the double whammy of technology and the pandemic, which has disproportionately affected millions of low-skilled workers.
Improving access to online learning is an investment all countries should be making. According to US online learning provider Coursera, there has been a fivefold increase since the start of the pandemic in employers offering online learning to their workers, and a ninefold increase in people accessing it through government programmes, including in developing countries.
In Costa Rica, for example, the government has worked with employers to identify the skills in demand, partnered with Coursera to build the required online learning programmes, and helped match graduates of these programmes to available jobs.
"No matter what prediction you believe about jobs and skills, what is bound to be true is [a] heightened intensity and frequency of career transitions, especially for those already most vulnerable and marginalised," says Hamoon Ekhtiari, CEO of FutureFit AI, a Canadian reskilling firm that contributed to the report.
The good news is that 97-million new roles are expected to emerge over the next five years in existing fields such as the care sector, as well as in newer industries such as those involving big data, artificial intelligence, the green economy, cloud computing and product development.
"We think the future of work is digital, but it’s also human," said LinkedIn chief economist Karin Kimbrough at the report’s launch.
Kimbrough believes the world will increasingly value tasks that involve collaboration, managing and caring. In fact, the pandemic has taught society to revalue in-person, frontline services such as nursing.
Moreover, getting into new digital fields isn’t as difficult as people may think. According to LinkedIn data, about half of all people making career shifts into these new industries come from unrelated fields.
We think the
— Karin Kimbrough
future of work is
digital, but it’s
also human
"So, you can come from just about anywhere and manage the transition," says Kimbrough.
You also don’t need advanced levels of digital literacy to make the jump, which is important for a country such as SA where, according to the report, less than 30% of the population has digital skills.
Coursera’s head of data science, Emily Glassberg Sands, points out that, for those without university degrees, there are still lots of opportunities in administering technology, including, for instance, as Google IT support specialists (who are employed by thousands of firms to help debug Google every day).
It takes just six to eight months to train online as one, she says, and is a useful stepping-stone to unlocking more formal IT qualifications over time. "It’s difficult and requires support, but it’s less the exception than we think."
Kimbrough says if policymakers could identify the small clusters of skills with an outsized effect on opening more sustainable career paths, it could make a real difference to reducing global unemployment.
But the window of opportunity for managing this change is closing fast, Zahidi warns. "In the future, we will see the most competitive businesses are the ones that have invested heavily in their human capital — the skills and competencies of their employees."
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