10 Jul Will I have job? See what data says

Will I have job?

I think No, if you are going to keep doing what you’ve been doing for long time.

I’ve been talking to a friend of mine who has just gone through another redundancy cycle. Since last few years I’ve known him going through the same challenge again and again. Luckily he has survived all the time.

I thought how long he can survive? I don’t know but what I know for sure is work place is changing rapidly.

You get a computer, it does your calculations. Now one fewer person is employed as a calculator. Or you get a good front-end loader and all of a sudden you don’t need people digging ditches because you can do it with machinery.

Few examples come to mind:

LinkedIn has started dominating the recruitment industry. Mauri Hanigan says ” Today, most companies, including all of the Fortune 500, have transitioned the recruitment function in-house, with the belief that it is much cheaper and more efficient to hire an army of recruiters and have them scour LinkedIn to find the best candidates.”

As per Forbes in 2012 “Revenues in LinkedIn’s recruiting services (“Hiring Solutions”) segment grew by 136% to $84.9 Million, making the company the fastest growing public provider of corporate recruiting solutions. ”

Piano: In 1914, piano sales totalled $56 million. That was more than double the sales of phonographs. Now in 1919, just five years later, sales of record players hit $158 million. Radio soon eclipsed that… By World War I, pianos were no longer an essential element of every living room. By 1933, two-thirds of American homes had at least one radio. Piano companies are making about 30,000 acoustic pianos a year now, they made 32,000 in 2013. That’s about 8 percent of what they made at their peak in 1905.

Amazon destroyed 1,200 Borders stores. Read more about impact of Amazon here.

Outsourcing: In the US, two and half million people working less full-time today than were working in 2007. This is because of outsourcing and technological advancements.

MIT Technology Review had this great article How Technology Is Destroying Jobs, below infographic shows how technology is impacting jobs.

Productivity and Employment

Where the jobs are going

Technology, Globalization, Automation is changing lots and lots of things. If you are not sensing the motion in your industry the survival will be tough.

It is going to become survival of the fittest.