IEEE Future Directions
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The World Economic Forum has published its 2018 Future of Jobs report, that makes for an interesting reading. The horizon is at 2022 (with some forecasting at 2025) and it contains some interesting considerations.
The report is based on interviews to key people (top executives and HR heads) in several industry sectors covering a broad spectrum of activities and it clearly shows the continuous penetration of automation in various forms (software and robots) in all parts of the value chain affecting blue collars and more and more white collars. It is also indicating the need for retraining of the current work force as new skills are becoming crucial for success.
These are the main findings (but read the full report if you are interested in the future of jobs):
- Competition is driving industry to be more efficient and automation is a no brainer in this direction. Automation is possible leveraging on ubiquitous high speed mobile internet (affecting both the manufacturing plant and the supply/distribution chains), employing artificial intelligence and leveraging on the (big) data generated by IoT and computerised processes. The cloud is becoming the “normal” way to support processing and data sharing.
- Exploitation of data is on top of the priority of industry, with expected massive adoption of machine learning and big data analytics. This has been indicated by 85% of the responders imagining the status of their business operation in 2022.
- Robots will be co-opted as workers in different ways by different sectors, although most industries see a growth of stationary robots, an increased penetration of mobile robots, including drones by 2022. Humanoid robots seem less attractive, but for some specific application sectors, including financial services.
- Significant changes are expected on the value chains, which means that the way of doing business and the involvement of players will be different in 2022. This is a very important point meaning that significant “structural” changes are just around the corner.
- Quite interesting is the discovery that companies by 2022 would select their “location” not on cheap labour, rather on the availability of certain skills. For many companies the location becomes a way to attract competencies and skills that will become more and more important. At the same time the life time of skills and competencies will get shorter and shorter, hence a company will need to be flexible and ready to move. By 2022 the report estimates that human resources will need an extra 101 day of “study” (that’s 5 more months!) to reach the level of usefulness they achieve today with their current education path.
Education seems to be the real game changer in the next decade. More on this in the next post.
