You will probably be made irrelevant at some point in your working life

If recent trends in India are to be believed, those employed in white collar jobs are at the risk of being made irrelevant in the coming years. This is probably not a worry for graduates who are entering the work force today as they would automatically be hired for the work of the future. It is also probably not a worry for those close to retirement as technology takes a while to permeate to the very top of an organization and the worst case scenario is early retirement with a good severance pay. But it should be a huge worry to those in the middle i.e. the people with 10 to 30 years of experience in the industry.

First let us look at the news. The biggest news is TCS firing anywhere between 3000 to 30000 people depending on who the source is. Most of those fired have 8–10 years of experience. TCS is also hiring 30000 fresh graduates this year indicating that this exercise is more to bring their pyramid back in shape rather than a loss of demand for their services.

Wipro has also indicated that it would trim its workforce to 100,000 people. But this would be more through the natural process of attrition rather than mass firings. And more interestingly, Wipro aims to replace those downsized positions through automation especially in their infrastructure monitoring practices. And this is the trend that research seems to indicate.

The economist in 2014 did a study which indicated that the period of technology spawning more jobs than it replaced might be over and suggested a list of jobs that had a high probability of being taken over by machines in the next 20 years. These include jobs from real estate agents (Probability: 0.86) and retail sales persons (Probability: 0.92) to economists (Probability: 0.43) and commercial pilots (Probability: 0.55).

Bill Gates also recently spoke about the lack of awareness among people on how soon their jobs can be replaced through automation and spoke about the need for keeping minimum wages low in order to encourage hiring.

And these are not predictions for the distant future. Lowe’s for instance already demonstrated a robot sales assistant that can identify a part brought in by the customer and take him or her to the replacement part.

Several car makers have piloted their driver less cars which can run without any modifications to the roads alongside other cars driven by human drivers.

Amazon employed robot’s to run its warehouses to meet the additional demand in the holiday season instead of hiring temporary workers like they usually do.

So it is but a matter of time that the jobs we do will also get automated. How do we prepare for being fired? In the typical scenario, we are fired because the company we are working for failed to predict the market or had poor management. So a firing does not mean the end of the road as there are other competitors who are probably desperately looking for the same skills.

But in this scenario, when the skills honed over tens of years are no longer relevant in the market, it is a more scary prospect as competitors might sooner or later switch to the same techniques and methodologies that got you fired in the first place. The only option seems to be to constantly monitor for advances in our area of expertise, never to live like our current income would last for ever, save enough cash to provide us with time to develop new skills and hope that it will all work out in the end.