The world today has been witnessing a radical shift towards automation. To make things less cynical and more lucid to my readers, let me begin by reminding you of Android’s Speech recognition apps, Windows’ Cortana or Apple’s Siri for that matter when you would be too lazy to open your music player app and prefer just uttering, “Play me a song” to immerse in a tuneful evening. Now, that you have acknowledged and accepted the entrant of automation in your life, let’s steer to a serious subject where automation has emerged as a potential threat to job security and more so as job slayer. Media is abuzz with jobs being constantly lost by people in the IT, ITeS, Manufacturing, Logistics sector and Front Desk Jobs etc. due to some sort of bots replacing the human element. Focusing on the Indian scenario alone, statistics points out about the plausibility of half a million or so jobs being lost in the next 10-15 years. A report by the Mckinsey Global Institute predicts the automation potential of India at 52%. What best could be extracted from many such similar reports is that jobs which has tremendous potential to be automated are those which are routine, monotonic and without any tinge of creativity. Moving on with the acceptance that automation is here to stay and hit hard at the job sector, let us explore the skills and traits that can keep one level headed in the face of this changing scenario and job opportunities that automation itself brings with it.

Creativity: One of the things that the smartest of bots would find it difficult or impossible is being creative. To be creative is purely a human endowment and putting it to use is sure to keep us ahead of any mechanization’s and automation’s. This trait of the humans and fallacy on the part of the bots means that jobs that involve creativity shall be future proof, in demand and vogue in an era of automation.

A human touch: Imperfections of a human hand might in some case out power the perfectness of a machine. Vocations in which the human element is indispensable such as core health care, education, professional sports shall continue to thrive whatever be the level of automation. Also jobs that involve critical thinking and decision making shall remain shielded from the bots attack.

Emotional Intelligence: This is another trait that that gives us the elation to identify ourselves as humans. People with emotional intelligence are known to effectively manage a team, plan events, stand for social causes etc. which could never be performed by some automated and mere data fed systems. To keep a cool composure and plan out an intelligent solution is something perhaps to be best left to humans than smart bots of the present or future.

Number crunching: In this digital era, what we are inexorably doing is creating data, be it by clicking a photograph, putting an update in social space or writing a piece. There is no doubt to a machine’s capability for computations. But what makes it imperative for a human element to be present is to make critical decisions to get meaningful output from a sea of data and information. This highlights the importance of data scientists or big data analysts. These professionals would have diversified opportunities ranging from fields of meteorology, IT to developing automated systems as well.

An eye in the cloud: Not everything in the IT sector is all gloomy with the advent of automation. The trick perhaps is to break even and don the learning cap in the IT sector to keep oneself updated to the latest. With cloud computing being rampant, there is avenues opening up for developers, security specialists in the cloud space.

At the end of the day, it is not a rewarding exercise to brood over the advent of automation in our lives. Given that it has the potentiality to make things faster, easier, safer and more comfortable, it can be viewed just as another revolution as that of the industrial revolution of the past that did take away tiresome and laborious jobs out of scene and gifted with a new world of opportunities. The same goes with automation. Lot many jobs would get obsolete but it sure would be a passing phase. The reward would be more beautiful with humans getting engrossed in stuff that only we could do best and leaving the routine, monotonous works in the hands of bots.

DECLARATION: The article is the author’s own work and the ideas are based on the reports
and statistics published by different agencies on automation, job security and future of jobs. This
work is not published till date in any other sources, under consideration for publication or
submitted to any other publishing house for publication.