The future of employment and its challenges - are we prepared?

Recent researches have shown that 40% of the current jobs will no longer exist in the next 20-30 years. This does not mean that there won't be any work around it just means that there will be a shift (again) in the types of  jobs on offer.

This has happened before in the past. During the industrial revolution, workers shifted from working on the land to working in factories in cities.

Since the advent of computers, many jobs have disappeared in all industry sectors.

Manual, repetitive, physical tasks are being performed more and more by robots controlled remotely by computers.

Repetitive, high risk labour means that a lot of people sustain injuries no matter how good your risk management is. Some of those injuries can be minor but other more serious injuries can cause permanent impairments and in some cases death.

Now correct me if I'm wrong but when someone goes to work, they plan to go home at the end of their shift in one piece and alive.

Therefore, replacing human labour by robots to perform tasks which can lead to injuries (whether minor or major) to me is a good thing.

I won't go into the complexities on how difficult it is be for some people to retrain because of their background as blue collar workers coming from a blue collar family.

I come from a family where I never saw anybody pick up a book to read. Just the newspaper and the TV guide and that's it. They all had basic literacy and numeracy skills but left school early to work.

I left school after graduating from high school and went to work but I loved reading from a young age and this lead to educating myself in all sort of subjects which continues today.

At over 50 years of age, I still have about 15 years or more (the way things are going) of working life. So how am I preparing for this upcoming shift? By not sitting on my butt and waiting for things to change around me for one thing. I am constantly learning new skills, staying opened to new technology, new ways of performing my tasks at work and staying informed on emerging industries.

So to all of you out there: never ever stop learning and you will be just fine...