How Might Technology Impact Jobs and Skills

20/10/2017
jobs of the future

Impact of new technology

The impact that new technology will have on future jobs and employment is a hot topic at the moment. Technology is moving fast and as a result there are many articles in the press speculating about how robots, automation and augmentation might take our jobs and change the skills that we will need in the future. However nobody knows for sure exactly what these changes are going to be.

What we can say with some certainty is that there will be change and that many of the jobs that people will be doing in 10-15 years’ time more than likely don’t exist today. We only have to look at the last few years to see how digital jobs have entered the economy, who would have known what a social media manager was in 2000?

Download our short paper

This paper provides a very brief overview of what the Essex Skill Evidence Base is telling us about job growth and skills at the moment, and presents opinion from a range of sources on the impact that technology might have on future jobs and skills.

Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? | David Autor | TEDxCambridge

Despite a century of remarkable labor-saving automation, the fraction of U.S. adults who work at a job has risen almost continuously for the past 125 years. This poses a paradox: our machines increasingly do our work for us: why doesn’t that make our labour redundant and our skills obsolete?