FORTY per cent of today’s jobs in Australia will disappear in the next 10 to 20 years and 40 per cent of companies are at risk of not surviving.

It’s a worrying prospect but one that, according to employment experts, is all too real.

While addressing a gathering of 25,000 key business leaders in June, the outgoing CEO of IT giant Cisco, John Chambers, said: “40 per cent of the businesses in this room, unfortunately, will not exist in any meaningful way in 10 years.

“Seventy per cent of companies will try to go digital – techie versions of themselves, and many will fail trying.”

In the same month, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) released a report that showed 40 per cent of Australia’s workforce, more than 5 million people, could be replaced by automation in the same timeframe.

A further 18 per cent of jobs are said to be at “moderate” risk of being replaced.

And the reason for the bleak figures? Research into the future of work shows automation and artificial intelligence will inherit the jobs currently done by humans.

Key jobs under threat from automation

Technology investor and former Microsoft executive Daniel Petre recently said within 30 years, if not sooner, artificial intelligence would be able to do everything humans could do.

“Anyone in a driving job is toast, they’ll all be driverless cars and trucks,” Mr Petre said.

“General practitioners will be impacted by big-data analytics in diagnosis and surgeons will be impacted by advanced robotics surgery.”

This follows news of a brick-laying robot that can lay 1000 bricks an hour; the Henn-na Hotel in Japan that is manned with 79 robot workers doing everything from checking guests in to cleaning and carrying their bags to their rooms; and a super computer, named Watson, developed by IBM that has been touted as the world’s best doctor and also has beaten former winners to take home $1 million on the quiz show Jeopardy.

Mr Davidson is a thought leader in the staffing industry, regularly speaking to the industry about the future world of work, having just returned from studying adaptive change under Harvard Professor Robert Kegan.

“The impact on the world or work and the future of many jobs, industries and companies will be immense,” Mr Davidson said.

“The good news is that many new jobs will be created and we can prepare and become ‘future fit’. The present indication is that many of the new jobs will involve science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) skills.

“In Singapore, up to 50 per cent of students are graduating with these skills. Whereas in Australia, only 16 per cent of graduates have a STEM-related degree and high school participation rates in these subjects is dropping.”

Not all doom and gloom

In order to realise our potential for innovation, Mr Davidson said Australia needed an appropriately skilled workforce; a workforce fit for the future.

Building on work undertaken at Oxford University, new analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that 44 per cent (5.1 million) of current Australian jobs are at high risk of being affected by computerisation and technology over the next 20 years.

PwC’s modelling in April this year, in the report A Smart Move, found shifting just 1 per cent of the workforce into STEM roles would add $57.4 billion to the nation’s GDP (net present value over 20 years).

“Businesses competing in a global economy driven by data, digital technologies and innovation will need more employees trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM),” PwC’s Partner, Consulting, Jeremy Thorpe said.

Mr Davidson said there was an optimistic way forward for those who accepted the need to change and were prepared to adapt.

“The other side of the coin, is that we need to develop skillsets that make us uniquely human – social intelligence,” he said.

“Social intelligence is one key skill which will be less susceptible to computerisation. Social intelligence is defined as social perceptiveness, negotiation, persuasion, assisting and caring for others.

“Much is being written about the importance of putting humanity back into the digital age. Building better humans is the more interesting prospect.

“There will always be jobs where humans prefer to deal with humans and the key to success for many people will be in building these skills.

“Empathy in particular has been highlighted as the critical skillset of the 21st century.

“It is unlikely robots will be able to mimic empathy any time soon in either ours or our grandchildren’s live times.”

Jobs such as coaching, counselling and caring roles are set to become the next boom sectors, according to Mr Davidson.

“When it comes to critical decisions in our life, such as making an important career decision, many people will prefer to deal with an empathetic human, someone who feels our angst and can relate to ‘what we are going through’,” Mr Davidson said.

“People are still humans.”

Make the most of your ‘human’ skills

So how do we remain relevant and be of value to a workforce in our 80s? Learning and constantly reinventing ourselves is the key.

“With the average tenure of jobs being three-and-a-half to four years, combined with the accelerating rate of change, our view of education and training needs to change,” Mr Davidson said.

“The days where we lived under our parent’s safety net, then go through years of continuous education, before we become productive members of the workforce and then finally retire back into the safety net of our own savings is going to become a thing of the past.

“The new model for future workers will be where we continue to learn and develop new skills throughout our entire career. We will have many careers and we will be constantly changing our direction.

“The skills we use today may well become redundant tomorrow and, thus, we will never stop learning until the day we retire.”

Mr Davidson said he was seeing this first-hand with clients and businesses he worked with across Australia and New Zealand.

“I am seeing this issue emerging more and more with my coaching clients, particularly those who are over 50 years of age and who want to continue to work for at least the next 20 to 25 years,” he said.

“I was confronted by these issues myself recently when I travelled to do a course on behavioural change at Harvard.

“I was truly surprised by the number of attendees I met who, at 50 years-plus, were contemplating or starting PhDs. It seems that the rest of the world has progressed further down the path of life-long learning than many of us in Australia.

“As a 53-year-old career coach and a father of children in their early 20s, the message that really hit home for me was how, in the future, learning will need to become a life-long survival skill,” he said.

“Constant change is the new normal and the pace of change will only increase from now on.”

TOMORROW

IN our second feature on the future world of work, we take a look at how the next generation needs to prepare in order to be employable in such a dynamic and technology-driven workplace.

As the age of retirement rises, those of us already in employment at least have more time to reskill and learn how to fit in with the support of an existing job, but for children and students, there are critical pathways that need to be taken if we’re to avoid becoming a nation out of touch with the requirements of the new workplace.