The last year or so has seen tremendous growth in doomsday like predictions of the impact technology will have on employment. A raft of studies have been released, most of which take great relish in declaring how many jobs will be lost as a result of technology, and particularly automated technology. Such studies have many flaws, but possibly their largest is they succumb to the 'lump of labor' fallacy, which assumes that there are a fixed number of jobs, and therefore once they are lost they are lost for good.
Of course, we all know that isn’t the case, and throughout human history, technology has created as many, and often times more, jobs than it has destroyed. So what are some of the new jobs that might emerge thanks to technological developments? That was the question posed by Cognizant recently in a new paper that examined 21 new jobs that they believe will be created in the next ten years.
The report attempted to find jobs that both don’t exist today and that might employ large numbers of people. It breaks each job down according to their ‘tech-centricity’ and displays each role in the form of a job description, thus outlining the kind of tasks they believe such people will perform.
The 21 roles, which include ‘personal data broker’ and ‘genomic portfolio director’, span a range of sectors and departments, but they each share three things that Cognizant believe will be crucial to the future of work in the machine age:
1. Coaching - there will be a strong focus on helping people to get better at certain things.
2. Caring - health and wellbeing will be increasingly important in the future as health systems struggle to cope to changing social, economic and technological trends.
3. Connecting - the future will increasingly be a partnership, whether between man and machine, traditional and shadow IT or physical and virtual. Being able to bridge these worlds will be key.
"These 3C’s speak to a universal truth – that no matter how technological our age becomes, ultimately we, as humans, want the human touch. We want technology to help us, as a tool, but we don’t want technology for technology’s sake," the report says.
Cognizant are firmly and unashamedly in the optimist (or more accurately realist) camp, and the authors book What To Do When Machines Do Everything is one that I’ve covered on this blog in the past. As such, theirs is an outlook that is one I largely agree with. Technology will undoubtedly disrupt a great many jobs in the coming years, but all the evidence to date suggests that it will create just as many, if not more. The problem is that those that are lost are very known and familiar to us, whereas new roles are unfamiliar and unknown, therefore they seem less tangible.
It remains to be seen whether the 21 specific roles outlined in the report will come into fruition, and whilst they are indeed interesting, I think it’s a mistake to get too bogged down with specific positions. Instead, the message to take away from the paper that the 4th industrial revolution will bring a great many benefits to society, not only in the services technology will provide us, but in the new roles that will emerge off the back of the change.
The challenge now is to ensure that the population has the tools and capabilities to learn throughout their life so that they can re-skill sufficiently to take advantage of the new jobs that emerge. That will be the topic of my next post.
