How automation is changing the future workforce

Since the pandemic started, we’ve been working from home and finally starting to get to grips with it. We’ve only just found the optimum point in the house that has a strong internet signal yet only 6 steps to the fridge. But the nature of our work is likely to face even more significant changes in less than a decade. 

As we all know technology is constantly shaping our reality and inventing new ways to do things, a new report estimates that 50% of all job tasks could be automated by 2030. 32% of jobs are likely to change significantly. This could impact 6.5 million Aussie workers. That means our jobs might be on thin ice. So what are we going to do? 

Workers will need different skills

We’re “gently encouraged” (forced) to figure out how we can be more resourceful in the next few years. The number of skilled technology workers will need to increase by 80% by 2025 to keep up with the tech wave. Jobs of the future will demand 3 key elements: STEM education, creativity and emotional intelligence. While automation will displace some workers, new jobs will also be created in fields such as data science, software engineering, robotic engineering, process automation, blockchain and machine learning. The demand for manual labour will be in decline and replaced with jobs that require more social, emotional, higher cognitive skills such as critical thinking, complex information processing and creativity. 

Tap into your human potential

So much of what actually moves business and culture and anything in this world is what people would sometimes call ‘soft-skills’, it’s all of the invisible stuff that creates trust, belonging, understanding and belief. We have to bring our whole self to work. If we’re only our analytical self when it comes to work, if we don’t show up with our humanness then won’t we be replaced by all this machine learning? The things that are repetitive is where AI wins, it never gets tired, which is the opposite of our deeper gentler nature. And the creativity and the living spirit of ideas come from people and groups and AI could not possibly replicate. That’s why we’re effective as human workers, because of the randomness, subjectivity and mystery of humans. Those are the things that we don’t even understand ourselves so how do we teach that to machines. It’s only ours. 

People work alongside machines

Work will need to be redesigned to ensure humans work alongside machines most effectively. It applies to banking in the forms of ATMs, online banking that take care of the routine money-handling activities for the employees so they can do the human work assessing individual requirements of clients using their own creativity and intuition to offer the right financial product that suits the client’s need. As technologies are integrated into the workplace, we will see human involvement in complicated tasks such as managing, operating, monitoring the automated system and resolving issues that may arise. 

Higher paying and rewarding careers

Machines can’t take all the jobs. What they do is simply increase productivity allowing the companies to expand further and create more jobs in the end. The next decade would int