Grab your job before it flies away

 Apparently the accountants of London are not keen on returning to the office, according to the Financial Times. But maybe they should be doing everything they can to hang on to those jobs, which could be susceptible to automation. One of the very firms whose workers wish to cling to home-working post-pandemic, PwC, found that nearly 40 percent of workers it surveyed globally believe the job they do will be obsolete within five years. Four in 10 people saying “my job is gone”! That’s pretty terrifying, isn’t it? And six in 10 believe automation is putting their jobs at risk.

What strikes me is how soon this gloomy forecast is expected to come true. Isn’t it more normal to put off the day of reckoning? We all know we’re going to die, but even when the clock has ticked to a point where each year brings a greater likelihood, it remains an impossible event. So why are people all over the world – 32,500 workers in 19 countries – shrugging their shoulders and saying “I’m gone”.

All the chatter about artificial intelligence and robotic systems has had some effect. When you read gloomy prognostications about machines taking over much routine legal work, and see what jobs are future-proofed (personal health care and AI design!) you might think It Could Happen Here. And it’s become a cliché to say (as PwC does in this report, The future of work : a journey to 2022) that many of the job titles of tomorrow “will be ones we’ve not even thought of yet”.

If you work in marketing, software design, health care, do you think your job will be gone? Or just how it’s done? As a dinosaur myself – a 20th century newspaper journalist – you could look at it two ways: the way I did my job is gone, but the actual task of collecting, writing and editing news still exists, even if the lowering of journalism borders caused by the internet has thrown a bomb at it. 

Glassdoor reports that the most in-demand jobs in the UK this year are topped by delivery driver, project manager, and customer/store assistants. Hmm. I doubt that driverless vehicles will be delivering all the Amazon packages, or the vegetables from Estonia, by 2026. And projects will always need to be managed. Shop assistants, on the other hand, might be more vulnerable, with the pandemic having given online retail a push it didn’t need anyway.

However transportation, according to PwC and others who have examined this question, does appear to by consensus be a sector with a high likelihood of automation. Education is at the other end of the scale.

What do you think about your job – a rather chilling version of the old “where do you see yourself in five years’ time?” Not, hopefully, in the dole queue.

 

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