Will a Robot Take My Job? Maybe.
Here’s How to Protect Yourself
In almost all professions there is a growing concern about AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics, how they will impact the workplace, and which jobs will be impacted, specifically.
In many areas of life we embrace AI and robotics, such as our smart-home devices, navigation devices, and robot vacuums; for the most part those devices have enhanced our lives, without taking jobs away (unless you were a professional map reader).
On the other hand, AI and robots are encroaching on and eliminating jobs in many industries such as banking (many banks now have video conferencing at ATM machines, which enables a teller to assist with more complex transactions and allows the bank to eliminate the brick and mortar location – and the employees), car sales (Carvana has been selling used cars from vending machines for six years), and the production of steel (over 100,000 jobs lost in the industry in the last 20 years, due to automation).
Many skilled and tenured employees are wondering: Will a robot take my job? And the answer is: Yes, quite possibly.
There is almost no telling where an AI technology can be used to supplant a skilled employee. While the most obvious jobs to be impacted are those that are transactional and repetitive (bank teller, fast food worker, cashier), more skilled professions can be impacted as well such as a surgeon or design engineer.
Human-Only Skills are Needed
According to the Future of Jobs Report published by the World Economic Forum, the “jobs of the future” will rely on critical behavioral skills (not technical skills) such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity.[i]
A more recent study published by IBM[ii], which surveyed over 5800 senior business leaders in 50 countries identified “ability to work effectively in a team environment” and “ability to communicate effectively in a business environment,” as two of the top five skills needed in business today.
What these studies show is that 21st-century work is about thinking and contributing, not just about doing and certainly not about following directions. More than having the right skills, future workers need to possess the right behaviors, and behaviors are not something corporate America teaches.
How to Protect Yourself
If you would like to protect yourself from robot-replacement you need to develop the types of behaviors listed above. Your function may be replaced, but you will not, because you will be making a uniquely human contribution to the organization. Here are 3 skills which will help you stay employable in the 21st century – and how you can demonstrate them.
Creativity
Most people think creativity refers to being able to conjure something up from nothing, like an artist or author. But in business, creativity means recognizing that there is no “right answer” to most dilemmas and the creative individual will look for multiple solutions before deciding up on the best one – not the right one. To develop creativity, be sure to not accept the first answer or solution that presents itself; use phrases like, “What else is possible?” “Let’s think about this and revisit it in a few days.” or “How can we break this?”
If you’d like a free 3-page guide to increasing creativity in the workplace, visit https://www.trainingdr.com/special-reports/ways-to-boost-creative-thinking/
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is ancillary to creativity; it is another way of ensuring that the first reasonable solution isn’t seized upon. One way to think more critically is to conduct research – who else has encountered the same type of issue? what do your customers think? can you test-drive the solution in some way? One of my favorite ways to think more critically is to answer the question “What could go wrong?” People are naturally inclined to think their ideas or solutions are sure-fire winners, but a critical thinker will look at the idea from all angles and consider how the outcome might not be ideal.
Ability to Work in a Team Environment
More and more, output is accomplished by teams. Even if you work remotely, from your home, it’s likely you are part of a team. Although young people have often participated on teams, being on a team is not the same as working as a team. And teaming is not a skill that is taught in corporate America. In order to be a successful team contributor you’ll need good listening, paraphrasing, and feedback skills. Asking for, and respecting, other people’s opinions is also critical; people feel more a part of a team when they feel they’ve been heard and considered, even if ultimately their input isn’t utilized.
Conclusion
Being able to stay ahead of the robots means being able to contribute those “uniquely human skills that cannot be done by machines,” says HR researcher and analyst, Josh Bersin. Computers can only manipulate and react to data, while humans have curiosity, perception, possibility, and communication on their side.
The future is not that far-off – think about how quickly smartphones have become a must-have device for almost everyone you know. The time to prepare yourself for your future job is now when you have the ability to plan your career success, rather than waiting to see if a robot will take your job or not.
Updated June 19 2020
According to The International Federation of Robotics, for every 10,000 workers, the following countries have robotics:
Singapore - 831
South Korea 774
Germany 338
US 217
Invest in Critical Thinking = HUGE ROI
Some organizations still believe training is a cost-center rather than a money maker.
But the right training, applied at the right time, can have exponential returns! According to this short report on Critical Thinking, published by Pearson in 2013, the return on investment for critical thinking tends to be extremely high. Research has shown that when training moves a $60,000 a year manager or professional from “average" to "superior," the ROI is $28,000 annually. (emphasis, ours) 4
How would your organization like to make $28,000 per year, on each of its managers? We can help. It's what we do.
Do YOU Have 30 Years to Wait to Develop Leaders at Your Company?
Organizational Development research tells us that it takes 30 years of on-the-job experience for someone to acquire enough well-rounded skills to be a successful leader. In addition to on-the-job experience, it is important to have experience in numerous areas of business. Hence time on-the-job + exposure to many areas of business = a C-level individual with the perspective needed to run an organization. But thirty years? Who has that kind of time?
Here are a few profiles of organizational leaders who have been on that 30 year journey:
Mary Barra, Chairman and CEO of General Motors
Prior to becoming the CEO, Barra worked in product development, purchasing and supply chain, human resources, global manufacturing engineering, as a plant manager, and in several engineering and staff positions. She joined GM in 1980 and spent her entire career (30+ years) at the company.
Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart
McMillan joined Walmart as a teenage warehouse worker (in 1984) at a local store. He rose through the ranks, working as a buyer, in various levels of store management, and eventually headed up Sam's Club and Walmart's international operations (operating in 26 countries outside of the US).
Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President and CEO, IBM
Prior to being promoted to CEO, Rometty held senior-level positions in sales, marketing and strategy. She began her career at IBM in 1981 as a systems engineer and worked in IBM Consulting as well.
Not everyone has to be a "lifer" within an organization, however. Generalized business experience is helpful as well.
Kenneth Frazier, CEO of Merck & Co.
Frazier spent 20 years as a trial attorney - spending numerous summers teaching trail advocacy in South Africa - before joining Merck as counsel in the public affairs division in 1992. From 2007 to 2011 he led the Human Health division of Merck, before being named President in 2011 and then CEO in 2014.
The most prominent trait of these CEOs (and undoubtedly thousands of others) is the variety of roles and functions within which they worked (and learned). In fact, two separate articles by Forbes in 2015 and the NY Times in 2016, point out the "path to CEO" is dependent on well-rounded experience and experience in many functional areas.
This is an approach that corporate education could support, but rarely does. We tend to "silo" people in to a role or function and encourage them to become a specialist; concentrating all of their experience in that specialist area.
From the NY Times article:
Marc Andreessen, the prominent venture capitalist, has gone so far as to call [well-rounded experience] the "secret formula to becoming a C.E.O." The most successful corporate leaders, he wrote, "are almost never the best product visionaries, or the best salespeople, or the best marketing people, or the best finance people, or even the best managers, but they are top 25 percent in some set of those skills, and then all of a sudden they're qualified to actually run something important."
We Don't Have That Kind of Time
Unfortunately, we don't have 30 years to get our next generation of leaders ready. In order for our companies to remain vital 15 to 20 years from now (when the Boomers, with the most work-experience are all gone) we need a way to accelerate that well-rounded learning. T
he Training Doctor's Thinking Curriculum has one such answer. The customized curriculum is designed to facilitate the very things that make a C-suite leader: a variety of functional experiences, an understanding of finance and strategy, being able to synthesis information about unfamiliar situations, networking and making connections, and more (these attributes were identified in a 2016 study of 459,000 executive profiles via LinkedIn). The best part of The Training Doctor's Thinking Curriculum is that it allows an organization to "bring up" leaders from within the organization which is often critical in terms of historical knowledge and cultural fit.
A recent publication from DDI, titled High-Resolution Leadership, highlights both the length of time it takes to develop leadership skills, as well as the need to accelerate the process:
"Business has hastened the pace of leaders being thrust into roles of increasing scope and responsibility, ready or not. Too often this leads to a mass "arrival of the unprepared" into more complex and perilous higher-level roles where stakeholder scrutiny and the cost of failure are exponentially higher. Leadership is a discipline. Improvement requires learning, practice and feedback - lots of each. But generic skill development won't provide the capability you need for your business. Any efforts you make to accelerate the growth of leaders should train them to apply newly learned skills to the specific challenges and needs that your organization faces now and will face in the near future."
It's folly to focus solely on leadership development, however. It's in every organization's best interest to build the skills of everyone in the organization. What organization can say they don't need people who understand strategy, problem solving, risk management, or decision making? What organizations would rather get-by with employees who don't have self- management skills (as Uber's CEO Travis Kalanik recently demonstrated) or who don't embrace ethics, teaming, or continuous improvement?
Every organization and every individual can benefit when everyone's business-acumen is enhanced. Learn more here or give us a call to see what your customized curriculum might look like.
If Colleges Don't Teach Thinking - Who Will (us)
According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of 200 nonpublic colleges: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
At The Training Doctor, sadly, we are not surprised. It's why we have an entire curriculum dedicated to teaching thinking skills.
Here are a couple of highlights (lowlights?) found in the WSJ analysis :
At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table
Test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years
Some academic experts, education researchers and employers say the Journal's findings are a sign of the failure of America's higher-education system to arm graduates with analytical reasoning and problem-solving skills needed to thrive in a fast-changing, increasingly global job market
You can see the full article here.
And we can help you to overcome this problem – if your incoming employees are suffering from an education that hasn’t actually educated them - by clicking here. At The Training Doctor, we teach thinking skills.