73 Million U.S. Jobs Are Killed by 2030?
Immigrants. Businesses. Offshoring.
Common three themes. Common three buzzwords used by politicians to generate emotions and anger by the masses all to be elected or re-elected.
What they do not mention is the actual reality that rapid technological advances and automation that will be challenging to the job market and shaping our future economic landscape.
A lot of labor, blue-collar, manufacturing have become automated and to those that have not, have been off-shored to third world countries to find a cheaper alternative to labor, improving the bottom line to corporations’ profitability. White collar work is in the midst of disruption as well and that aspect will continue to grow.
A lot of these jobs are not coming back. Why?
Because we are in the information technological era, not the manufacturing era.
When one speaks of automation, we think: artificial intelligence and we further think about just robots. This is a frightening reality to millions of Americans, especially the Millennial generation who find themselves to be at the cusp of this ever changing global economic landscape.
The report has some notable highlights. Although the institute did lead with the title that up to 73 Million jobs will be destroyed, they did mention that there is huge potential for those workers to transition to similar occupations and estimate about 20 Million could easily make that transition, although performing very different tasks than they were previously.
However, this means that up to 54 Million will need to be re-trained for entirely new occupations — a third of the American workforce.
Computers and robots have already disrupted the workplace and the sad reality of all this, is the fact that this current disruption is being covered up, under the full employment headline the U.S. is currently harboring, as the current politicians are happily taking full credit.
The McKinsey Global Institute highlighted another aspect worth noting.
Corporations are now more profitable than ever, which is incredible considering the world was near a global economic collapse about a decade ago. Companies are harboring more cash than ever before, but there has been a huge disconnect in how they would like to deploy that cash.
Cash that could be used towards bettering their employees’ paychecks to fend off the rising cost of goods and services as well as overall general costs of living. Unfortunately, that cash may never be used for that purpose but to continue to advance convenience and mass production that boosts profitability for shareholders.
The logic is simple: Invest in machines, that could efficiently build a product with zero deficiencies on a mass larger scale than any human could, saving time and therefore, causing supply to be more.
Who benefits (they argue)? Consumers. More supply. More choices. More choices, lower prices.
And there in lies, the groundwork for economic theory.
With this growth on the corporate side, the hope would be that this would offset those jobs that would be completely lost through automation itself.
The study pointed out that, however, that economic growth and the strong potential for rising wages could be the end result of automation once the dust settles. With a growing and aging population, the demand in the investment in health care, renewable energy arena and to those workers that are needed to operate those machines.
The national and global population will continue to grow and so will automation. There is strong danger in that there would not be enough supply of labor to meet the demands of a growing population.
The institute’s report pointed out that those physical jobs that provide customer service will be the jobs that would easily be eradicated, so do not be too surprised when you see a machine handing you, your Big Mac sandwich from the take-out window in the near future.
Those jobs that are the safest, according to McKinsey? Occupations and careers that involve managing people and those that involve high-level expertise. Occupations such as engineers, scientists, health care professionals, IT professionals, educators as well as gardeners and plumbers.
We will face the wrath of technological advances and now we all need to prepare ourselves to be more creative with how we view our work and careers.
We do need to retrain and retool. We do need to learn more and continue educating ourselves.
We do need to start becoming subject matter experts.
Find your niche.
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