Monthly Archives: February 2018

People Skills Are In

Strategy

You might have noticed in the news, on social media, or in your talking with various people that the job market is changing.

Blog Post - People Skills

You might have heard that a lot of jobs are going to disappear. Particularly routine manual and routine cognitive jobs.

However, it is not all doom and gloom, for one of skills that will experience increasing demand is the skill of dealing with people.

Think of sales managers, supervisors, project managers, team leaders and so on. Where the skills of directing, controlling and planning are central to success. These are the management and supervisory jobs. And with these jobs the critical component of success is the ability to manage and lead people.

One example of this is the replacing of checkout staff with self-serve machines at major grocery stores. While the routine checkout jobs are cut back, staff with people skills are needed all the more. For these self-service machine supervisors are having to deal with more complexity (they are watching over multiple machines) and having more complex interactions with people (ie, item lookups, ensuring all products are scanned, ensuring queues aren’t increasing, etc).

In this changing job market, whilst some “standard” jobs are being lost, ones with a different mix of skills will be in demand.

For the student in your life, it is advisable to maintain a clear-eyed consideration of the changing job opportunities.

 

For more of what I have to offer, visit Dellium Advisory, follow on Twitter, connect using LinkedIn, review my IT Strategy blog, subscribe to my YouTube channel, or buy my ‘Jobs. Future. You.’ workbook.

Advertisement

Routine manual jobs are on the way out.

Career, Futures, Futurist, Strategic Foresight

You might have picked up on the news that the nature of the job market is changing.

Blogpost - Factory

Now, while it is true that the economy has always changed over time (for example, do you remember that Australia used to ride on the “sheep’s back”?) it seems that the rate of change is increasing.

And you can put that down to the impact of computers.

The impact of computers on jobs over the coming years was highlighted by Frey and Osborne in their 2013 “Future of Employment” study and CEDA, in their 2015 “Australia’s future workforce” report, further developed this understanding. However, the real discovery was by an MIT Economics Professor (David Autor). Through an investigation into the amount of human labour used by USA companies for jobs dominated by manual tasks, he found that demand for this type of labour had declined by about 10% over the 50 years from 1960.

Now, while companies were still producing things that required manual tasks, they require fewer men and women to do that manual work.

The impact is that some entry level jobs are lost and that jobs for the lower skilled are harder to find. It means that career choices must be made with more consideration.

So, for the student in your life, a clear-eyed consideration of the changing job opportunities must be paramount.

 

For more of what I have to offer, visit Dellium Advisory, follow on Twitter, connect using LinkedIn, review my IT Strategy blog, subscribe to my YouTube channel, or buy my ‘Jobs. Future. You.’ book.