Home About Our Blog The Changing Face of Work

 

It was over two years ago, when we had the CEO of GE, Steve Sargent, as guest speaker for Australia’s Biggest BUSINESS Morning Tea, that he told the hundreds of attendees, if you work in a low skilled and low paid job, you need to start thinking about it, because it is not going to last – your role will become automated.

 

Then last year, I listed to a talk from a Sustainability Manager at Deloitte, who said ‘ Do you want to know the future– I can tell you in two words … women and robots’.

 

The automation of jobs will continue to grow and many roles will become redundant. Candidates need to look at their jobs with a critical eye to decide the risk level of automation within their own roles.

 

Recently I was prompted to asked a computer programmer ‘what was the greatest risk to our survival  - Global Warming or Artificial Intelligence’? Her answer – Artificial Intelligence! Machines can think now, they can calculate risks and make assumptions and decisions based on hard facts, and big data. Binary decision making, no longer requires a human. Humans cannot read all case studies, locate all precedents, calculate all figure with 100% accuracy. Machines can. Technology will take away the low skilled, manual tasks.

 

Even in our small business, we have moved to greater technology, with cloud-based timesheets, cloud based employment inductions, headsets to eliminate having to hold the telephone handset, typing data directly into our database, and electronic documents. For example, inductions years ago used to take a consultant about 45 minutes, while they now, do not require a consultant’s time at all.

 

What is going to be needed are the roles that work with humans.

 

Workers who understand human interaction, emotions, have superior experience, great leadership skills, strong persuasive ability, highly developed oratory skills, management skills and high level reasoning and abstract thought. Stop focusing on your data entry, word processing, numerical or administrative ability and focus more on developing your customer service and people management skills. Humans will always need other humans and this is where the future of work lies.

 

Call us today (1300 923 000)  to put your name down for our Recreate Your Career Workshops, which will help you understand what employers are looking for and how to respond.

 

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