Future of Work | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Is your job really safe?

Even in industries that are safe individual jobs aren’t secure as technology changes most roles

Yesterday we looked at the PwC report on the value of science and engineering education to the economy.

The survey wasn’t good news for the workforce with the survey predicting over two in five workers’ jobs were at risk as digital technologies changed industry.

Notable in the list were the industries PwC believed to be safe over the next twenty years; largely being the medical, health and ‘people’ businesses like public relations.

While the industries themselves might be safe, specific jobs in those sectors may not be so with roles ranging from hospital porters being replaced by robots to surgeons carrying out remote operations.

Looking at the list of relatively unaffected industries, it’s hard not to see how digital technologies aren’t going to disrupt those occupations.

Redefining public relations

PR for instance is undergoing a radical change as the media industry is being totally disrupted requiring today’s public relations professionals to have a very different set of skills to those of twenty years ago.

Those skills include a much more adept use of technology itself and having to deal with a faster, more fragmented industry.

Public relations professionals brought up in the days of boozy lunches and far off deadlines struggle in a time of bloggers, social media and data journalism.

Evolving medicine

Similarly medical practitioners, the top position on the list, have seen their jobs dramatically transformed over the past twenty years by computers and those changes are far from over as medical equipment gets smarter, personal fitness devices become pervasive and the amount of data being collected on patients grows.

Across the medical industry the roles of almost every occupation is being redefined as technology changes the tools they have, along with the nature of ailments their patients present with.

Big Data and analytics

Some professions will grow but automation in those fields will grow exponentially faster, a good example being the fifth role on the list – database administrators and ICT security professionals.

Ensuring the reliability and security of servers and networks is going to become even more essential as the economy increasingly depends upon these systems however security and IT professionals are going to rely on algorithms and Big Data to manage the massive task they have – these are the opportunities for companies like Splunk and Microsoft Dynamics.

In all of these comparatively safe industries the jobs of tomorrow are going to need different skill sets to what they require today.

For workers in these ‘safe industries’ this means further education, training and reskilling to stay employed. Just being employed in a sector that’s expected to stay static or grow isn’t enough to keep your job.

Employers in these ‘safe industries’ also face a challenge in making sure their staff have the right skill sets to use the new technologies.

The airline analogy

If you were running an airline in 1965 it would be cold comfort to look at the explosive growth ahead for the industry in the jet airline era when all your staff are trained to keep propellor aircraft in the air.

So when we talk about digital disruption, it’s not just about industries being shut down and jobs being lost but about radically changing occupations.

It would be a brave person to assume that just because their industry is safe, their own job or business is secure.

Literacy in old and new terms

Is data literacy as important today as being able to read and write was a century ago?

I’m in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, for the next few days for the Open Source, Open Society conference.

During one of the welcome events Lillian Grace of Wiki New Zealand mentioned how today we’re at the same stage with data literacy that we were two hundred years ago with written literacy.

If anything that’s optimistic. According to a wonderful post on Our World In Data, in 1815 the British literacy rate was 54%.

That low rate makes sense as most occupations didn’t need literate workers while a hundred years later industrial economies needed employees who could read and write.

Another notable point is the Netherlands has led the world in literacy rates for nearly four hundred years. This is consistent with the needs of a mercantile economy.

Which leads us to today’s economy. In four hundred years time will our descendants be commenting on the lack of data literacy at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century?

What will the workforce of the future look like?

How do we imagine the economy, workforce and government of 2055 will look?

Yesterday this site looked at the shortcomings of the Australian government’s Inter Generational Report and criticised it primarily for its failure to imagine how society and the economy would look by 2050.

While no-one has a crystal ball, making projections on how government spending will look in the future without having some basis for the assumptions on revenues and expenditures renders a document like the IGR somewhat useless.

So what might Australia’s economy in 2050 look like? Here’s a quick list of thoughts.

Rethinking retirement

The obvious is most western societies, including Australia’s, are going to be older. This has a number of consequences, particularly with the retirement age.

In 1909 the old age pension was introduced in Australia with eligibility starting at 65 for men and 60 for women. At the time, life expectancy was 55 years for men and 59 for females.

Today age pension age has barely moved with it becoming 67 for those born after 1952. Life expectancy today 91.5 years for men and 93.6 for women, this expected to increase by 2055 to 95.1 and 96.6 respectively.

More importantly, life expectancy at age 60 will move from 16.9/19.3 years today to 21.3/23.1 in 2055.

Quite clearly the superannuation assumptions of being able to get a tax free pot of gold at 60 are doomed, few people will get enough from their lump sum to see themselves through twenty years retirement.

That throws them back on to the state. Given these numbers it’s clear the eligibility age for the old pension is going to have to be increased.

Coupled with a declining birth and participation rates seeing fewer taxpayers contributing to government coffers, the need to reform the pension age is going to become more pressing.

A healthier population

One of the differences between 1909 and today is that we’re far healthier. A fifty something today is generally in better shape than a thirty year old of their grandparents’ time.

Coupling that with the changing nature of work where most workers of a century ago were employed in exacting physical labour, today’s employees are far more likely to be sitting on a computer. This means the working life can be extended.

While the population is going to be healthier, an older population is going to mean more people with chronic conditions and those with serious issues like dementia are going to be an increasing drain on medical services, not to mention increased incidence of cancers and possibly diseases related to sedentary lifestyles.

This means the nature of medical treatment is going to change, a lot more is going to be spent on early identification and intervention of chronic and debilitating conditions.

Changing the workforce

While the workforce is going to get older, it’s also going to become more precarious. This is already clear in the long term trends since the 1980s and with the rise of ‘collaborative economy’ businesses like O-Desk, Mechanical Turk and Airtasker we can see jobs becoming more casualised.

Today’s children will not have a steady career path and governments have to plan for extended periods of unemployment. This too affects the participation rate and the levels of household spending.

A precarious income also means workers are less likely to take on large debt commitments. This trend is already apparent and is the main reason why companies with a 1960s consumer spending model are struggling in the economy of 2015.

Property stagnation

The Australian middle class model that depends upons highly indebted householders paying down mortgages is likely to be unpopular by the middle of the century as people will be reluctant to take out a huge loan to buy a property when their medium term job prospects are uncertain.

This one aspect is where the Australia government projections go badly awry. It’s understandable not to consider this given the political poison of telling the population their assumed property gains aren’t going to happen but it damns the IGR to failure.

A society with lower levels of property ownership means a dramatic shift in the tax mix and government expenditures. Assuming that today’s normal will also be tomorrow’s is very risky.

Changing technologies

The technologies themselves are changing the revenue and expenditure streams for government, just rolling out diverless vehicles might eliminate the need for half the US’s police force while reduced registration fees, taxes and fines will hit state and local government budgets.

Similarly the global nature of digital businesses is going to challenge governments as the locations of where work is done, goods are delivered and profits made becomes less certain. Right now tax officials are struggling with the revenues of multinationals but increasingly smaller companies will present the same problems.

The other changing nature of work is going to be its composition, just as a hundred years ago nearly half the workers in western countries were in agriculture, a number that’s below one in twenty today, we can expect changes in employment sectors as robots and algorithms take over many of today’s jobs.

All of this means a very different society and workforce to today’s. While it’s difficult to envision what it looks like from here, just as the current economy was almost unimaginable in 1975, it’s necessary to give some thoughts on the shifts to make informed policy choices rather than the opportunistic populism displayed by most of today’s political leaders.

So how do you see the economy of 2015 looking? And where are governments going to raise their money from? I’d be interested to hear what you see in the crystal ball.

Is the tech startup sector a boys’ club?

The Ellen Pao sexual discrimination case illustrates the risks in letting an industry be a selective boys club

I’m putting together a story on what the Australian tech community can learn from the Ellen Pao story where an upcoming female associate at iconic Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers sued the firm for sexual discrimination.

Although Pao lost the case it rightly caused much debate within the US tech community about the lack of gender diversity, particularly given the number of women in the American venture capital industry has collapsed from 10% in 1999 to 6% in 2014

The reason for this seems to be simple, as Lauren Helper pointed out in the Silicon Valley Business Journal back in 2013 the industry is intensely tribal quoting one industry participant, Mark Taguchi, ‘“people operate in tribes,” he said. “They have groups of people that they learn to trust, that they work with, that they like.”’

In some respects this is a strength for the Silicon Valley industry as it means new entrants have to be vouched for by trusted figures but it also risks the sector being insular and dominated by narrow groups based on background, ethnicity or gender.

Once an industry defines its leaders and innovators by their friendships, schools or workplaces it risks becoming irrelevant to the outside world and it’s inevitable an inward focus will blind the group to new trends and developing technologies.

The warning from Pao’s case is Silicon Valley may be becoming too insular, it’s a handy wakeup to remind participants there is a big, diverse world outside the Bay Area.

However the US tech sector might survive without diversifying given its size and access to capital. Forother countries’ developing industries – like Australia’s – it’s a hindering factor few can afford.

In most ecosystems diversity is strength, it’s hard to see how that’s any different for the tech sector. Boys Clubs are relic of last century and have little place in this one; for regions looking at copying Silicon Valley, this is one trait not to pick up.

User generated content starts getting expensive

As YouTube faces competition we may be past the glory days of free user generated content

Ten years after being founded YouTube is facing competition as new sites are being setup or existing video services start aggressively courting creators reports Variety magazine.

YouTube is the poster child of the user generated content movement where it’s largely unpaid contributors who generate the material that people watch on the service.

This model works fine as long as it’s amateur cat videos people are watching but when as it becomes a big business the justification for not paying content creators becomes flimsy.

Google’s management recognised this some time back and started rolling out its own partnerships with creators to add more income than the often tiny advertising revenues most earn.

Now it turns out those popular video bloggers are being tempted over to other sites and for YouTube the cost of premium content is about to get expensive.

For the Silicon Valley businesses is requires a change of culture as they simply don’t like paying creators; in the tech startup view of the world it’s only coders, founders and few lucky support staff who get the rewards while the bulk of people who add value to the product are treated as commodity ingredients.

For a period it was difficult for media startups to get funding unless they had a free source of user generated content, as Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti revealed in 2012.

Tech investors prefer pure platform companies because you can just focus on the tech, have the users produce the content for free, and scale the business globally without having to hire many people.

The movie studios and record companies on the other hand have a culture of paying their artists and production staff, despite their reputation of exploitation and stinginess.

It may well be that we’re past the golden era of user generated content and the free lunch for the sites that depend upon free materials.

If it is, then standards on sites like YouTube can only improve even at the costs of Google’s profit.

Software eats the sports cameraman

Are sports TV camera operators the next occupation to be eliminated?

Since the beginning of industry technology has changed occupations in unexpected ways the demise of the sports TV cameraman is a good modern example of a highly skilled, specialised trade that may soon be redundant.

Years ago television studios largely replaced cameramen with remote controlled cameras but sports grounds needed skilled operators with excellent attention spans to video action at sports grounds.

At a lunch today in Sydney Michael Tomkins, Chief Technology Office of Fox Sports Australia, explained how a combination of high definition cameras and advanced software is changing the way sports are broadcast and recorded.

“Last year we put two 4k cameras in to cover the length of the ground,” Tomkins said. “Two 4k cameras can see the length of the whole ground so I get rid of four cameramen and replace them with one joystick bunny.”

“He moves a box around the screen and those become a virtual camera. The resolution of a 4k camera is four times that of our HD broadcasts. It’s quite cost effective and I don’t have to roll a crew out.”

A demonstration of how the technology works is in a YouTube clip of an Australian Rules football match from last year. While the ‘joystick bunny’ and the software is somewhat clumsy in the segment, the clip shows the power of the technology.

With abolishing most of the camera, the opportunity to rationalise the production suite also becomes possible; at present most sports events have a producer instructing a group of assistants to cut between cameras, prepare replays and all the other effects expected by viewers. With a software based system most of that labor and its skills become redundant.

Over time as higher resolution cameras become available this application is going to become common, in fact most junior and amateur sports will be able to afford static hi-res cameras for their ground that allows them to record their games.

While the demise of the sports cameraman and producers is a shame in the same way loom weavers and hansom cab drivers disappeared, it is a reflection of changing technologies creating then destroying occupations.

TV camera image through wikipedia

Technology’s crisis of trust

Last night for the monthly ABC Nightlife tech spot we looked at Samsung’s spying TVs and some of the other aspects of security with connected devices.

During the listeners’ calls it became very clear many are worried and scared by technology’s rapid progress. This is a challenge for the leaders of both the tech industry and governments.

Trust in the tech industry isn’t being helped by the revelation Lenovo computers have been loaded with Adware that, among other things, interferes with secure website connections.

Lenovo’s actions raise a serious concern for business as many of those home units may have been connected to office networks under corporate Bring Your Own Device policies and the spoofing of security certificates could cause no end of problems and risks for IT managers.

Another concern Lenovo’s actions raise is about the Internet of Things; if various devices on a network are messing with data integrity, confidence in the information being generated is eroded.

For the tech industry, it’s essential to regain the community’s trust. Equally however it’s essential for business and political leaders to have an honest conversation with voters and workers on how the structure of the workforce is changing.

Measuring Facebook’s network effect

Has Facebook really been responsible for creating over four million jobs?

It’s always best to treat a business’ or industry group’s claims of economic benefits with a grain of salt and the survey released yesterday by Deloitte on measuring Facebook’s effects on the global economy is a good example.

Facebook’s Global Economic Impact looks at what the social media service added to the world’s economy and finds the company created 4.5m jobs and $227 billion of value in 2014 outside of its own operations.

Deloitte’s analysis breaks down Facebook’s effects into three general categories; platform effects, connectivity effects and market effects.

In coming to their figures, Deloitte’s researchers further broke the numbers down into the direct revenues of businesses using Facebook, the indirect impact upon suppliers and the ‘induced effect’ of employee spending patterns.

The basic formula, although the methodology gets quite complex in extrapolating the value added, is described in this illustration.

The main areas of contention are the employment multiplier effect, which Deloitte marks at 3.1 in Brazil down to 2.1 in the UK with the United States coming in at 2.7, and the valuation of individual Facebook actions.

For example here is the description of how companies’ page engagement is valued;

Sales from Page engagement are estimated as
a product of the total sales of businesses with
Pages and the sales uplift estimated due to their engagement on Pages (see section A3 for how elasticities are estimated by econometric methods). The total sales of the businesses that have a Facebook Page are estimated using the revenues of the private sector in the economy based on national statistics. Survey evidence is then used on the percentage of businesses with a Page in the US and the UK.

For the rest of the world, the value of a liking action of a Page is estimated using relative GDP per capita of each country to the UK and USA to reflect the local economic conditions.

The gross revenue supported by Pages is then the product of the number of Pages liked and the value of a liking action of a Page.

The key here is the word estimated, there’s no doubt it’s in the interests of Facebook, the marketing agencies and the staff employed to manage social media to overstate this effect; it’s an arbitrary at best measure.

Marketing is claimed to be the most valuable aspect of Facebook, accounting for about two thirds of the service’s claimed economic value with a $148 billion contribution. Deloitte defines marketing effects as “the impact from businesses’ use of Facebook marketing tools to drive online and offline sales, and to increase awareness of their brand.”

Again this is subject to a number of arbitrary definitions and guesstimates which take us into the tricky area on measuring social media’s Return On Investment.

The reason why the numbers don’t pass the smell test is because of the sheer size; in Australia for instance the company’s effects are valued at $5.7 billion and employment generated at 63,000 workers. If we fully apply the 2.6 multiplier Deloitte attributes to the country this would suggest over 17,000 Australian workers are directly employed full time in running Facebook related tasks.

While it’s hard not to be sceptical of Deloitte’s numbers, it certainly is true that social media platforms have opened new roles for administrators, developers and other staff. We just need to be a touch cautious of overstating the benefits.

For businesses, probably the best lesson from Deloitte’s survey is to measure the genuine effects of social media on a business there have to be properly thought out measures and objectives. Guesstimates are not good enough.

Daily links – Twitter founder on social media, teenagers online and tech employment

Why social media numbers don’t matter, what are teenagers doing on Twitter and why tech companies are firing, not hiring.

Links today have a bit of a social media theme with Twitter co-founder Ev Williams explaining his view that Instagram’s numbers don’t really matter to his business while researcher Danah Boyd explains the complexities of teenagers’ social media use.

Apple’s patents and why the tech industry is firing, not hiring, round out today’s stories.

Feel the width, not the quality

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams attracted attention last month with his comment that he couldn’t care about Instagram’s user numbers, in A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep he explains exactly what he meant at the time and why online companies need to focus more on content and value.

Apple gets patent, GoPro shares drop

One of the frustrations with following the modern tech industry is how patents are used to stifle innovation. How an Apple patent for something that seems obvious caused camera vendor GoPro’s shares to fall is a good example.

Why is the tech industry shedding jobs?

Despite the tech industry’s growth, the industry’s giants are shedding jobs. This Bloomberg article describes some of the struggles facing the tech industry’s old dinosaurs.

An old fogey’s view of teenagers’ social media use

Researcher Danah Boyd provides a rebuttal of the story about young peoples’ use of social media. “Teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background,” she says. Sometimes it’s necessary to state the obvious.

Daily links

Apple extends its lead over Android in smartphone activations, a teenager’s view on social media and Google’s declining market share.

Today’s links are somewhat more upbeat; starting with Apple extending its lead over Android in smartphone activations, a teenager’s view on social media and Google’s declining market share.

Apple takes the lead in smartphone activations

In their regular survey of mobile phone activations, research company Kantor found that Apple have taken the lead back from Android phones. The Kantar Worldpanel ComTech global consumer panel monitors the brands of phones being connected through selected apps to give them an idea of what’s going on in the smartphone marketplace.

While not an absolute numbers, and one that was inflated by the new range of Apple iPhones released late in the year, it’s clear Apple are by no means out for the count when it comes to the smartphone market.

What teenagers think of social media

I’m not sure how accurate or scientific this story is, but it illustrates how complex the social media industry is and how dangerous assumptions are with what age groups use new media channels for.

How boring can driverless cars be?

Another story points out driverless cars are actually quite boring to ride in. Maybe we’ll all catch the train insead.

Google loses market share

Since signing an agreement with Firefox to be the default search engine provider, Yahoo! sees its share of the marketplace spike upwards. Should Google be worried?

So you thought a tech job was safe?

Document service Evernote cuts jobs proving that even a job in the hottest parts of the tech sector isn’t safe. Notable in this story is the concentration of employment in two locations which shows Silicon Valley isn’t keen on remote working at all.

Links of the day – touring an old nuclear plant and terrorists misusing Twitter accounts

Links for Sunday, January 4 – Terrorists and social media, cooks and smartphones and what an old nuclear power station looks like inside

From a quiet Sunday here’s some of the stories that have kept me occupied; terrorists misusing their Twitter accounts, what chefs really think of smartphone toting customers and more musings on the future of work in an age where robots and algorithms dominate.

To kick off the post, what does a nuclear power plant looks like after it’s been shut down?

Touring a decommissioned nuclear plant

Yesterday former New York Governor Mario Cuomo passed away, one of the most contraversial moves of his administration was closing down the state’s only nuclear power plant at Shoreham, Long Island.

In March last year Nick Carr had an opportunity to tour the abandoned site and posted the story of this visit onto hist Scouting New York website.

Where will all the workers go?

Economist Nouriel Roubini adds to the discussion about jobs in an age of robotics and algorithms in Where Will All The Workers Go? In his Project Syndicate piece, Roubini focuses on how the current wave of automation will affect jobs in emerging markets.

Today, for example, a patient in New York may have his MRI sent digitally to, say, Bangalore, where a highly skilled radiologist reads it for one-quarter of what a New York-based radiologist would cost. But how long will it be before a computer software can read those images faster, better, and cheaper than the radiologist in Bangalore can?

Like the rest of us he doesn’t have any firm answers except to suggest we may have to accept a new age of under-employment. This has serious consequences for today’s consumerist societies and the economic assumptions that underpins them.

The risks of Instagramming your Jihad

A clumsy Kiwi jihadist gave away the location of secret training camps in Syria through his Twitter account reports the iBrabo website. Mark Taylor joined an insurgent group in June this year and publicly burned his New Zealand passport on declaring he had no intention of returning to his homeland.

A few months after destroying his travel documents, The New Zealand Herald reported Taylor wanted to return home. All of which proves the point of The War Nerd that the best way the west can deal with its suburban jihadists is to give all of them a one way business class ticket to Syria.

How do chefs really feel about cell phone use in restaurants?

Many articles have been written about how restaurateurs are driven to distraction by mobile phone users in their establishments, but how true are those tales.

The Daily Meal interviewed a dozen US chefs about their attitude towards diners taking selfies and instagramming their meals. It turns out they are more concerned about their customers enjoying their meal rather than being upset at them shooting photos.

Hyundai connects their cars to Google Android watches

Korean conglomerate Hyundai has joined the connected car race with an Android Wear app that works with the company’s Blue Link system. The app, designed to work on Google’s wearable devices as well as smartphones, will work allow users to lock, open and locate their cars.

It’s another example of how car manufacturers are integrating wearable and mobile apps into vehicles and it’s a small taste of what’s possible when the smart home and the connected car start talking to each other.

Stack ranking claims another victim in Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo

Stack ranking claims another corporate victim with Merissa Mayer at Yahoo!

One of the clumsiest management tools deployed by modern executives is stack ranking, the practice of putting staff members on a scale where the bottom 20% miss out on bonuses and, in bad times, are the first to be fired.

The process has terrible effects upon the morale of workplaces as it rewards political manoeuvring over effective performance; the worker who focuses on their task and the business tends to be overlooked compared to those who curry favour with the boss.

Another debilitating effect is it destroys teams as it has the perverse effect of discouraging people joining teams with high flying colleagues as it increases one’s chances of receiving a poor rating.

Stack ranking has previously damaged Microsoft and HP and now it appears Marissa Mayer has made the same mistake at Yahoo!.

That Mayer has made the same mistakes at Yahoo! is a disappointment; there were so many high hopes for her in reinvigorating the troubled company. Indeed carrying out the stack ranking process every quarter seems particularly debilitating and management intensive, it’s hard to think of a more effective way of destroying morale and distracting management.

In some situations Stack Ranking can be effective but the way companies like Yahoo!, HP and Microsoft have implemented the method, it’s proven to be the wrong tool for the job of managing high skilled workforces.

When implementing clumsy management tools like stack ranking, it’s worthwhile considering whether it’s the right tool for the job.