The Future of Jobs
Will you have a job in the future?
What will that job look like and how will the nature of work change?
Will automation take over your job in the near future?
These are the kinds of questions that Ruth Fisher, author of Winning the Hardware-Software Game, has tackled in a series of posts.
I wrote a summary post to distill her big ideas and insights about the future of jobs in my post:
Fisher has done an outstanding job of framing out the landscape and walking the various arguments and perspectives on how automation will change the nature of work and shape the future of jobs.
One of the first things you might be wondering is, what jobs will automation take away?
Fisher addresses that.
Another question is, what new types jobs will be created?
While that’s an exercise for the reader, Fisher provides clues based on what industry luminaries have seen in terms of how jobs are changing.
The key is to know what automation can and can’t do, and to look at the pattern of work in terms of what’s better suited for humans, and what’s better suited for machines.
As one of my mentors puts it, “If the work can be automated, it’s not human.”
He’s a fan of people doing creative, non-routine work, where they can thrive and shine.
As I take on work, or push back on work, I look through a pretty simple lens:
- Is the work repetitive in nature? (in which case, something that should be automated)
- Is the work a high-value activity? (if not, why am I doing non high-value activities?)
- Does the work create greater capability? (for me, the team, the organization, etc.)
- Does the work play to my strengths? (if not, who is a better resource or provider. You grow faster in your strengths, and in today’s world, if people aren’t giving their best where they have their best to give, it leads to a low-impact team that eventually gets out-executed, or put out to Pasteur.)
- Does the work lead to world-class impact? (When everything gets exposed beyond the firewall, and when it’s a globally connected ecosystem, it’s really important to not only bring your A-game, but to play in a way where you can provide the best service in the world for your specific niche. If you can’t be the best in your niche in a sustainable way, then you’re in the wrong niche.)
I find that by using this simple lens, I tend to take on high-value work that creates high-impact, that cannot be easily automated. At the same time, while I perform the work, I look for way to turn things into repetitive activities that can be outsources or automated so that I can keep moving up the stack, and producing higher-value work … that’s more human.