The Future of Jobs
The employment sector has experienced drastic change within the last few years, with new career paths emerging while some are going extinct. The advent of information technology and artificial intelligence has and will continue to immensely affect job and employment rates both currently and in the future. The new IT options in place and, lately, the development of robots that undertake various tasks ranging from military personnel to cleaners generate skepticism about the future of work. It is a paradox that as the number of academic professions graduating from universities keeps rising, the market demand for employees is narrowing, which is a bottleneck that will inevitably undermine the future of employment. While it will be hard to secure a job in the future with conventional competencies, pursuing a career path in IT promises a secure future.
Various reasons support the choice for an IT career path. First, many jobs and activities that people involve and specialize in today have the potential of being outfaced by automation. Numerous companies in various industries are now integrating automation in their businesses as a way of speeding up processes and boosting efficiency and effectiveness. Reports show that automation is likely to replace about 25% of American Jobs by 2030, while the demand for industrial robots is rising at an approximate rate of 14% (Spencer 7). Globally, about 20 million jobs risk becoming extinct by 2030, primarily due to automation (Jarrahi 580). As such, it would be unsafe to pursue a career path not related to IT as it might be of less importance in the future.
Secondly, the demand for technologically savvy employees will experience a sharp increase in the future as organizations will need personnel to design, create, and manage information systems and artificial intelligence machines. In addition to the already existing management, operation, and manufacturing IT systems, a broad range of robotic technologies are already being commercialized or are near commercialization. The development and maintenance of automated aerial drones, humanoid land robots, and stationary robots, in addition to system logarithms and IT processes, will surely demand people who are highly skilled and well versed with complex IT skills (Jarrahi 582). Reports indicate that the jobs that AI and IT will generate in the future are far more than the jobs that will be lost.
Figure 1: Technologies by Proportion of Adoption (2022 Projections by the World Economic Forum)
Finally, the IT career path will be more sustainable than any other job in the future. As machines, data, and systems continue to shape the future, the demand for IT professionals, including data architects, data analysts, machine learning scientists, IT engineers, and database managers will be indisputable in almost all economic sectors. With few people taking IT-related courses currently, IT professionals will certainly continue to earn more in the future compared to professionals in other career paths.
In conclusion, as the job market continues to shift towards more automation and digitalization, the employment sector will continue to reform in a manner that favors those who are technologically competent and jeopardizes the path career of the unskilled and semi-skilled personnel. Thus, there is a need for more people to pursue IT career paths to effectively shape the future and minimize the bottlenecks that arise from the intensifying adoption of IT and AI by various organizations. The short analysis presented in this paper confirms that the future of the job market is bright, but for people who are motivated by the evolving information technology and artificial intelligence.