Job roles ahead... Prepare Now!
If someone told you 50 years ago that computers will the most common equipment in the office and most jobs would require you to have some proficiency with them. You may have laughed at them with some skepticism as computers were really large and expensive to own. Today you carry them in a phone, smart watch and many other devices with a silicon chip.
Speaking with a retired office lady, I was amazed to hear her story around photocopiers being made available within offices. Prior to photocopiers, typewriters had to type the same document on their device twice or thrice. Moreover, if they made a mistake in the copy you had to start all over again. This meant that making duplicate documents took hours, now with the advent of photocopier, duplicate documents just took seconds to produce.
COVID19 has disrupted many industries and made many individuals lose their jobs. Such mishaps can lead to life changing experience. People who will choose to stick to their previous set of skills will have tougher time to find opportunities. For example, airline staff are suffering job loses in various countries and new opportunities in the same industry are limited. However, some people are choosing to convert their skillset or build new ones to switch careers to get by. Below are a list of 6 possible new job roles that lay ahead which will be common in many industries in near future:
- Automation Engineers
With industry adopting Robotics Process Automation (RPA), more roles will become available for RPA developers and specialists. These people will have skills in developing routines in various RPA software. Automation engineers will surpass software engineers similar to how business analysts did in the past as these individuals will master business process management. There are already free courses available from various RPA vendors, so if you are interested in earning your RPA developer badge you don't have to go far nor invest a fortune.
2. Digital Labor Stewards
Labor is hard to manage even if it is digital, you need to ensure that they are doing what they are intended to do. Get over the hurdles, review logs, re-tune to avoid errors or mistakes, etc. Digital labor will need stewards who will ensure that the bots are doing the job that they are intended to do at their maximum throughput. To train in these roles, you will need to have experience in RPA tools as well as understanding on bot evolution.
3. Robotic operating center specialists
Just like the 2000s when IT development was outsourced to parts of the world for cheaper labour and quality of skills availability. You will also get to see that companies will opt to outsource their automation to companies offering value for money. For example, a company may offer automation bot as a service (ABaaS) and it may make perfect sense to simply outsource the entire automation to an organization to save yourself the cost of hardware, information security, audits, etc.
4. AI Algorithm Developers & Trainers
Artificial Intelligence isn't here to fade away, COVID19 has pushed the development of AI algorithms further more than ever. Organizations even as small as a coffee shop see the need of predictive analytics to know exactly what the impact of potential lockdown may be. AI has been heavily tested during the last 12 months in various fields such as procurement, healthcare, production space and so on. With AI becoming easily available as a platform, organization will need staff who can pick an AI model, train it on their organization data and provide desired outcomes. OpenAI is a great initiative and it will just do the same, so if you have interest in practicing AI, do checkout the OpenAI libraries.
5. Digital Process Engineers
In 1990s, business process re-engineering (BPO) made way for mass productivity. I remember being taught the example of credit card application in 1990s took over 30 days to get through the organization. With BPO, this was shortened to 3 days and later it was marketed as 'get a decision with 60 seconds'. Similarly, roles will open up in many industries for staff to digitally engineer processes to make them faster, more productive and save cost on the organization's P&L. You may consider this to be the transformation of business analysts role in future.
6. Data Scientists & Specialists
Today, data scientists are expensive as it takes a lot of skill set to become a data scientist. However, with innovative process and tools being developed by the industry. The cost of data scientist and specialists hire shall come down. You can also find many courses available easily for training on data science and now is a good time to get yourself qualified on these skills set.
Like all skills, it takes time to learn it and practice makes it perfect. Benjamin Franklin famously said "Teach me and I will forget, Show me and I will learn, Coach me and I shall remember". We need to continue learning new skills and technologies, resistance will make things difficult.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed in this article are solely the opinion of the author and do not represent or relate to any entity that the author has been associated with, is now or will be affiliated in future.