To be or not to be…
What should your child learn today in order not to lose a job in the future?
What did you want to do for a living when you were a child? To be an astronaut? Or a teacher? Maybe a doctor?
I thought I should graduate from an economic university. There was a good reason. In those days economists, financiers or accountants were respected, well-paid specialists. It could guarantee me a profitable and stable job. Today it’s not enough. How can you choose today what will be in high demand in the future?
A big agency, McKinsey, has made a survey and analyzed work activities for more than 800 occupations in detail. They researched many areas across the economy to assess the percentage of time spent on activities with the technical potential for automation. Let’s see what will be automated according to this survey and what will be left to people.
Routine physical work will be replaced by 80%.
What could it be? For example, cooking, all types of cleaning, and food preparation. Besides physical work, they believe that most processes in data collection and data processing will be automated. First of all, it concerns office supervisors and administrative support workers, answering service operators. Even nowadays when you call the biggest bank in Russia you’ll firstly hear a robot.
What industries have the highest automation potential?
For example, production workers performing predictable physical work comprise 25% of total work, of which 89% has the automation potential.
Food preparation and serving related workers performing predictable physical work comprise 52% of total work, of which 95% has the potential to be automated.
What industries have less automation potential?
Despite the threat of widespread automation, there is still room for human beings. Firstly, it is unpredictable physical work. Secondly, so-called soft-skills: stakeholder interactions, managing people, mentoring. Unpredictable physical work in cooking is creating new recipes. And in part, it’s an area of applying expertise.
There are more such areas in health care and social assistance: preschool teachers, behavioral disorder counselors. It is those types of work that can’t be easily classified or predicted.
Activities that have low automation potential in the sphere of educational services are business teachers, postsecondary, first-line supervisors of housekeeping, and janitorial workers.
Here are some more jobs that will not be automated soon:
Bottom line is if you want your child to have a job in the future, first of all, you should teach them interactions with others, managing people and processes. should be an expert in teaching and managing people and machines in his or her work sphere.
Otherwise, there is always a lot of unpredictable physical work in different areas. This part has not changed since my childhood: “Study well, or else become a janitor”. I believe we have some time before robots for unpredictable work will appear.
