The world of work has changed, and the rate of change is increasing. Despite the hopes of those who want to turn back the clock to the golden era of high-paying, low-skilled manufacturing jobs and an abundance of secure service-sector white collar jobs, history doesn’t have a reverse gear ™.
The world of work is never going back to the “good old days” of 1955, 1965, 1985, or 1995. Jason Burack of Wall Street for Main St. and I discuss these trends in a new podcast, Radical Changes in the Job Market, Now & in the Future (47:37).
Those hoping for history to reverse gears place their faith in these wishful-thinking fantasies:
1. That automation will create more jobs than it destroys because that’s what happened in the 1st and 2nd Industrial Revolutions. The wishful thinkers expect the Digital / 3rd Industrial Revolution to follow suite, but it won’t: previous technological revolutions generated tens of millions of new low-skill jobs to replace the low-skill jobs that were lost to technology.
Millions of farm laborers moved to the factory floor in the 1st Industrial Revolution, and then millions of displaced factory workers moved to sales and clerk jobs in the 2nd Industrial Revolution.
Even white-collar jobs that supposedly required a college degree could be learned in a matter of hours, days or at most weeks, and little effort was required to stay current.
The Digital/3rd Industrial Revolution is not creating tens of millions of low-skill jobs, and it never will. Even worse for the wishful thinking crowd, the 3rd Digital Revolution is eating tech jobs along with the full spectrum of service-sector jobs.
Those expecting to replace low-skill service jobs with armies of coders will be disappointed, because coding is itself being automated.
The new jobs that are being created are few in number and highly demanding. Jobs are no longer strictly traditional boss-employee; the real growth is in peer-to-peer collaboration and what I term hybrid work performed by Mobile Creatives, workers with highly developed technical/creative/social skillsets who are comfortable working with rapidly changing technologies, who enjoy constant learning and are highly adaptive.
