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How long before the bots take your job?

General information April 3rd 2018
How long before the bots take your job?

Robots taking the work of humans is not a new concept. Since the industrial revolution, workers have been facing an adapt or die approach as the machines moved in and took the jobs of workers. For example, with the arrival of the car, saddle makers were forced to diversify their offering and moved into making leather goods such as footballs and luggage. The threat faced today is that autonomous vehicles could one day take the jobs of professional drivers. This could threaten the jobs of truck and taxi drivers throughout the world.

In call centres, more and more customer enquiries are being handled by artificial intelligence chatbots. And they're proving much more popular with customers thanks to their ability to process vast quantities of interactions and learn from this data. By 2030, it is estimated that nearly two-thirds of all jobs could be automated, and this would impact 800 million roles. If you're concerned about bots taking your job, it's time to start preparing.

Don't neglect the STEM subjects - If you're concerned about bots taking your job, then you should be aiming to get ahead of the curve so that you can get involved in this revolution. Retraining in science, technology, engineering or maths could ensure that your job is future-proof as you'll be involved in creating and maintaining those very same robots.

Become indispensable - Although robots might move in and take a lot of the jobs, they will still need humans around to handle the cases that the bots can't. For example, although it is estimated that many call centre roles will be replaced by bots by 2020, bots will only be able to handle between 60 and 80% of all enquiries. This leaves a good portion for the human counterparts. If you want to avoid the job cull, it's important to specialise in your role and ensure that you bring something to the table that a robot simply cannot do.

Start retraining - Many industries won't be impacted by robots, so it isn't too late to start thinking about a change of career. You can start by looking at the services people look for which have nothing to do with an online environment. This might mean going into teaching, the medical profession, or even food preparation. While a robot might be able to throw together a pizza or flip a burger, fine dining is unlikely to be affected by the rise of the robots.

In conclusion, we should probably look at increasing our ergonomic chair section to include ergonomic chairs for the bots but why make it easy for them? Seriously though, if your job currently involves staring at a screen for eight hours a day, it might be time to start thinking about how you can future-proof your income.

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