Experts warns South Africa’s joblessness is at a crisis level, if truth be told. But the situation might become worse if its people are not reinventing themselves to keep abreast of changes in the job market, warns Martin Pienaar, COO at Mindworx Consulting.
“If employers and employees do not get to grips with what this means for companies, they are not guaranteed of work in the future.”
Pienaar fears as much as 60% might become obsolete. If employers and employees do not get to grips with what this means for companies, they are not guaranteed of work in the future.
The next industrial revolution is here, observes Pieanar.
“People connected in real time by mobile phones and billions of connected sensors, are resulting in a revolution driving efficiency and productivity.
“Devices are getting cheaper, more powerful and more efficient which is pushing the internet into the industrial world. In this world, capital expenditure is giving way to monthly operating costs, where for example, the low cost of cloud computing allows for the growth of greenfields organisations, which means more entrepreneurship and resultant innovation,” says Pienaar.
Thus, In this tech-era, companies should measure themselves on their responsiveness, not just the traditional assets and regulatory frameworks that have secured their success in the past. Competitors of the future will likely not be the same as the past and they will be faster, cheaper and do it better than you can. There is not an industry unaffected.
Employees need to reinvent themselves too, as it is highly unlikely that businesses of the future will insource all functions. The business model is likely to be a mix of own and outsourced pieces and ‘employees’ will need skills in managing outsourced relationships. ‘On-demand’ skills must be mixed with full time teams in order to allow companies to rapidly scale up and down based on innovation cycles, but also to ensure they are constantly resourced with current and best-of-breed skills. In order to stay competitive, companies will need to ensure that their permanent employees stay current too. Reskilling for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence/machine learning, big data, virtual and augmented reality, blockchain, robotics and the internet of things will soon be essential. Many of these technologies are coming out of a deceptive phase and becoming disruptive in the unlikeliest of industries. Robots are advising financial services clients, virtual reality is being used to solve pain issues in the medical realm and driverless cars have completed many millions of kilometres in California and Texas.
