Jobs jobs jobs?

Australia has notched up a world record – 26 years without a recession. That’s the longest time between recessions for any developed country, since records began.

During  that time Australia has withstood the Asian economic crisis of 1997, the tech crash of 2000, 9/11, the global financial crisis of 2008 and a mining construction slowdown post 2012.

The last time Australia had a recession, in mid 1991, Bill Hayden was Governor General, Bob Hawke was Prime Minister, Carmen Lawrence was Premier of WA, and we had the first Gulf War. Bryan Adams’ Everything I do, I do for you was number 1 forever, other hits of the year were I’m too Sexy, Things that make you go Hmmmm and Ice Ice Baby…. agh they don’t make ‘em like that these days do they?

Back in ‘the recession we had to have‘ (as then Federal Treasurer, soon to be PM, Paul Keating termed it) Federal opposition leader John Hewson affirmed the GST as a major policy platform (which later became electoral suicide). The Simpsons debuted on Network Ten, Hawthorn beat the Eagles in the grand final and Mitchell Marsh was born. The population of WA was 1.6m, 1 million less than today.

There’s no doubt the Australian economy has been resilient, and been fairly fortunate. A whole generation has grown up with almost full employment, low interest rates, more and more jobs, rising standards of living and lots of opportunity.

The current Aussie economy is dynamic, with over a million Aussies changing jobs annually, with businesses constantly entering and exiting various marketplaces.
While agricultural and manufacturing jobs have declined in total numbers, the expanding service sector has taken on more.

12 million people have jobs in Australia – 6.5M men and 5.6M women. Healthcare and social assistance is now the single largest industry, accounting for over 12% of the workforce. Unemployment has held steady around 5.5%.

And yet… there is an impending sense of unease out there.

When some people hear politicians and even a Prime Minister spruik ‘Innovation’ all they hear ‘redundancy’ and ‘unemployment’.

Change, although the only constant, is threatening and scary. It makes people look for the easy scape goat solution, be it Brexit or Trumpism.

The answers are not so straightforward.

A few months ago my teenage daughter bemoaned to me that she does not know what she wants to do when she is older. I told her not to worry.

“The jobs of 5 and 10 years’ time have not been invented yet, isn’t that amazing?!” I say.
“Well, that doesn’t help!” comes the reply. “Take it from a former CEO like me,” say I, “the employers of tomorrow will want your creativity, your leadership skills, that you can work in a team, or independently with initiative on your own, your problem solving, your empathy with customers… THAT’s what they’ll hire. Learn & demonstrate those skills and you’ll be fine.”

But what kind of jobs will be there for our kids and grandkids in the near future? What industries will fall, and what new ones will rise? Will we even have a thing call a “job” or a “career”? Does it even matter? Will more of us have more free time? Will robots be waiting on us hand and foot, or by robotic arm and robotic wheel?

This was the topic of an Innovation Summit I moderated recently, a 4-minute chat with the panellists from West TV can be viewed here.

Some of the discussion:

• while a robot might replace 5 manual workers, every new tech job creates 5 more.
• some jobs will disappear, others will be required.
• many of us may will enjoy a ‘portfolio career’, where we take on several titles – we’ll be part social media consultant, part MC, part web developer, part teacher.
• A (Cognizant) report declared recently that the following jobs will be created within the next five years: data detective; bring your own IT facilitator; ethical sourcing manager; AI business development manager; master of Edge Computing; walker/talker; fitness commitment counsellor; AI-assisted healthcare technician; cyber city analyst; genomic portfolio director; man-machine teaming manager; financial wellness coach; digital tailor; chief trust officer; and quantum machine learning analyst.
• Within the next 10 years we’ll have: virtual store Sherpa; personal data broker; personal memory curator; augmented reality journey builder; highway controller; and genetic diversity officer.
• It will be important to spread our risks as an economy – the mining industry is super wonderful when booming, and awful at other times (which is the majority)

The “death of the job” has been predicted before. Although the disruptive changes we are seeing seem to be changing more things more rapidly, there is time to adjust, and new opportunities will always be thrown up. The winners will probably be those (countries, states, organisations and people) that can adapt, and the losers will be those that are stuck in their ways.