A look at what the future holds for jobs in Tasmania

Many jobs in Australia will be lost to automation over the next 20 years. The ‘job for life’ may be no more, but there will be other ways to earn a crust

Once upon a time, every high-school student was taken aside to spend some time with a careers counsellor. The idea was to assess each student’s strengths and weaknesses to help steer them towards the career that best suited their particular talents and psychology. The advice was meant to help determine the courses and subjects in which they enrolled in following years.

As a teenager in the nineties I was told I would make a good journalist. I spent nearly a decade poking around in other directions (sciences in college, philosophy degree at university, bar work in between) before I eventually ended up in a newsroom While my counsellor apparently nailed it, I had felt uneasy about being given a specifically defined career path that early in life – regardless of what I might be well-suited to, I certainly had no idea what I wanted to do.

As it turns out, mine might have been the last generation to be sent forth into the world with such a linear plan for education and employment, and the last with any expectation of settling into a “lifelong” career.

As today’s youth is finding, the nature of employment and the labour market is shifting dramatically and looks different from the workforce its parents and grandparents knew.

The proportion of people working casual or part-time jobs is increasing, entrepreneurship is no longer just an aspiration but almost an essential skill, having a university degree is no longer exceptional, and school-leavers hoping to go straight into an entry-level job on a factory floor are increasingly likely to find that job being done by a robot.

How do we future-proof our schools, universities and the next generation of job-seekers in preparation for this future we can’t yet see clearly? According to delegates at a recent seminar in Tasmania, the trick to navigating our future employment and training is not to be armed with all the answers but to know all the right questions. For instance: when three humans are made redundant by a new robot on the manufacturing floor, how can that efficiency boost be used to create new jobs for the displaced workers elsewhere in the company?

The University of Tasmania’s office of Community, Partnerships & Regional Development, along with the Tasmanian Leaders organisation, held a Think Bank seminar just outside Launceston last month, with delegates representing the spectrum of industry in the state, from hospitality to forestry, public service to milk processing.

Their task was to spend the weekend discussing trends, concerns and observations they have made about Tasmania’s labour market, with a view towards helping inform the university how it can best prepare their students for the job market of the future.

What emerged was a consistent set of factors that each sector saw as being influential: “digital disruption” caused by rapidly advancing technology; automation of jobs previously done by human hands; a workforce that will increasingly work remotely; the value of educational qualifications and how they can be more specifically tailored; and more frequent retraining as people move more rapidly between jobs.

There is a perception that university degrees lose some value as the “supply” goes up. University of Tasmania’s Community, Partnerships & Regional Development representative Andrew Pitt says that, with more people holding a degree than ever, it is the vocational relevance of that degree that becomes more important.

“Compared with 50 years ago, when maybe 5-10 per cent of people had a uni degree, that figure is now closer to 50 per cent. But rather than becoming less valuable as more people have them, a degree is still a big predictor of your overall employability.

“UTAS will need to be increasingly looking at a more diverse offering, including associate degrees that further bridge that space between university and TAFE, by offering degrees that can be tailored to a variety of needs, as well as catering to people who need a more industry-specific education, such as agribusiness.”

Pitt says the key to being prepared for the future is to see factors such as automation and digital disruption as opportunities rather than threats.

“In theory where one job disappears, another opportunity arises, and in theory that’s the way free markets work, but the reality is that it’s a lot harder than that.

“If an industry declines and you lose those entry-level positions, you can say to people, ‘Here is your chance, go work in a different industry, learn to do something new’. But the reality is a lot more complicated, not least with regard to people’s aptitude to be flexible and ability to retrain.

“People currently in the workforce are likely to work in seven or eight careers over their lifetime, and there will be a need for retraining several times along the way for everyone. So what is important is to embrace that, be prepared for it, and for educational institutions to be equipped to deliver that.”

Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show a marked decline in mining and manufacturing jobs, whereas the big growth industries are hospitality, real estate, science/technology services and healthcare services.

In other words, jobs that can be done by machines will continue to usurp manual labour, while there will be a corresponding increase in jobs that require a human touch: a robot can rivet the pieces of a car together but you might not want one cooking your steak or doing your prostate exam. And artificial intelligence is not yet advanced enough to do the creative work of a writer or graphic designer.

DOES IT REQUIRE A HUMAN TOUCH OR CREATIVITY? IF THE ANSWER IS YES, THEN GO FOR IT

This trend suggests teenagers who expect to walk into unskilled labour or manufacturing jobs straight out of high school may soon find those opportunities have dried up.

Stephen Piper, who represented the primary industry processing sector at the Think Bank, says manufacturing and processing are going through almost constant restructuring. And while the automation of many jobs is inevitable, Piper says the way to mitigate the impact on employees is to ensure plenty of opportunities for learning and professional development aimed at keeping staff in the sector, but in new roles.

As people in manual labour are forced to retrain in vastly different skills, Piper offers himself as an example. “I’m an industrial dinosaur,” he says. “I did my trade apprenticeship at the paper mill at Burnie many years ago, that whole industrial space. But a few years ago I chose to go back to uni and do fulltime study to get my MBA [Master of Business Adminstration], because that was the thing I wanted to be able to fall back on. I’ve moved on to other roles through my industry since then, so I have adapted. It is possible. We just need to ensure other people have the same opportunities to do so.”

Louise Mills from the Department of Premier and Cabinet represented the public sector at the Think Bank and says a similar effect is happening in her sector as a result of advancing computer technology.

Digital disruption might be in the form of new computer software that allows one person to do the work of two, or the internet allowing an office to outsource some jobs to remote locations. But, like Piper, Mills says this does not necessarily have to mean the end of someone’s job.

“If you embrace a digital disruption for an efficiency gain, it means you should be able to reinvest that in some way.

“Take the example of photography going digital. It means the role of the film processor has gone, the courier who took your film to be processed is gone and so forth.

“But what it also means is that the graphic designer has to be more generalised and do a lot of that image processing themselves now, and the client expectation around quality is much higher, so you might need to employ more than one person to do that side of things. It means you have to do what you do better.”

If as every door closes another opens, the question becomes how we ensure people find those new opportunities. Colony 47 health and wellbeing services manager Glen O’Keefe says the ongoing automation of entry-level jobs for those leaving school is a big concern.

“There is a risk of increasing social disadvantage as further automation leaves people behind,” he says. “It’s all about lifelong learning now. The younger generation, in particular, needs to be very familiar with the prospect of change.”

Part of learning to live with that constant change will be equipping students with the skills they need to be able to retrain regularly, fostering a spirit of entrepreneurship, and encouraging more lateral thinking about career choices.

“Someone might choose horticulture as an industry but that might not necessarily only be about being outside on the land,” O’Keefe says. “There is a range of other sides to it, such as administration and so forth. Hospitality doesn’t just mean pouring beers. There are plenty of other aspects to the industry to move into, such as accommodation, restaurants, managerial roles, so it becomes a matter of knowing what jobs there are in your particular area.”

Susan Moore, the Asia-Pacific region communications director for international technology research and advisory company Gartner, says this paradigm shift will most likely require schools to create new subjects that teach generalised skills, building resilience, adaptability and innovation.

“The skills children of the future will need will be more along the lines of problem-solving, creativity, skills that are needed in every job,” she says. “And teaching entrepreneurship will be vital: if you can’t find a job, build your own, hone your particular skill and market that. That will become more and more important as the traditional-style job becomes rarer. People will be forced to make their own opportunities.”

O’Keefe agrees, saying that in 20 years the very idea of being employed by a company will probably be unusual. This scenario will come with its own issues: working for yourself usually means you forgo the benefits of being employed by a big company, including sick leave and company-paid superannuation. But O’Keefe says the flexibility of work hours, personal autonomy and a better work-life balance bring their own rewards.

“In the future we will essentially be contractors, choosing what we want to do, paid for our outcomes rather than time,” he says. “That way of working has been shown to improve people’s work-life balance.”

Accordingly, we can catch a glimpse of the future in co-working spaces and shared offices, where individual entrepreneurs and freelancers from a variety of industries offer their particular services on a contract basis to whoever needs them.

Rather than working for a building design company in a building full of architects, engineers and draftsmen, an architect might work as an individual, picking the jobs he or she wants to take on, working from either a home office or a co-working space, and working on projects across the globe thanks to the ease of online communication. And as these individuals move from project to project, the independent nature of their work ethic will make it that much easier for them to adapt what they offer as the market shifts around them.

The acid test for assessing the future viability of your job or dream career is probably this: does it require a human touch or creativity? If the answer is yes, go for it. If the answer is no, it might be time to consider what extra skills you need to add to your repertoire. And it might not mean changing industries, just doing something a bit different in it.

READY FOR ANYTHING

Meredith Castles proudly refers to herself as an “ADHD employee”, with an almost pathological aversion to staying in any one job for too long.

Castles, 36, from Rokeby, has had 10 jobs since finishing university in 2003 and while only some of those changes were by choice she says the regular shifts and direction changes suit her perfectly.

“I have a really good work ethic, but I can’t see myself doing any one career for 20 or 30 years because I’m just interested in so many different things,” she says. “So I’ve just ended up retraining and doing something new every couple of years and I’ve really enjoyed it. Even in a job I don’t necessarily love, I can still always find something about it that will get me out of bed every day.”

Over the years Castles has worked in office management, been a professional actor, a proofreader/editor, an English and acting tutor, a domestic assistant/cleaner and a market researcher. She is now in academia, having recently completed her master’s degree in computer science, and is preparing to start a PhD in the field of human-computer interaction. As well as her own research, Castles tutors students at UTAS, which she says is a perfect culmination of her varied career trajectory.

“I think deep down I really enjoy retraining and learning new things all the time, which is why academia fits me so well right now,” she says.

Castles says not having a partner or children makes it easier to be flexible. “I’ve never really had a plan, but I’ve also never been worried about landing on my feet because I’ve learnt to be adaptable,” she says. “I know people who have been in one career a long time. They are scared of having to retrain, they don’t see the possibility of doing something else and being good at it or enjoying it.

“I don’t think people in the future will have a choice. You’ll have to be prepared to fly by the seat of your pants.”

REMOTE CONTROL

One big benefit of the online revolution and the rollout of fibreoptic broadband is it makes it much easier to work remotely. If your job only requires access to a computer and phone, working from home can become an option – a very attractive option for many people. Susan Moore, 47, from Gartner, works from her home office at Franklin.

Originally from Sydney, Moore and her husband, David, moved south seven years ago and love the quiet life with their dogs. Not only does Moore enjoy the lifestyle of working from a home office, she says her productivity has increased as well.

“I’d been doing this job in Sydney for four years before I moved, which makes a difference,” she says. “I was already doing the job and brought it with me down here, whereas getting someone to employ you remotely is much harder.

“I manage a small team all based around Asia, so I spend a lot of time on the phone and on Skype as well as communicating by email and instant messenger.”

There are some drawbacks and being proactive about interacting with other staff is vital.

“When I first moved down, I knew everybody in the company, but as time went on, people move on, jobs and roles change,” she says. “So I need to keep physically visiting the main office in Sydney regularly to network, talk face-to-face and so forth.”

Moore says the relative ease of working remotely is fostering the growth of the freelance economy. “What you see more and more is people being brought together to work on a specific project, then they disband when it is finished, and they come together again in different groups for a different project for a different employer,” she says.

“I’m already doing that. I’ll bring in an external freelancer to work on a new website, for example. I think that pattern will be much more common in the future – people will be operators, rather than employees.”

Her husband also works from home, running an IT support business. Moore says there is a common misconception that working from home means sitting around in your pyjamas and doing the odd load of washing in between tasks, but she says taking her mind off domestic life is not the problem.

“I actually find the opposite is the problem; I have trouble turning my work brain off at home, stopping work at the end of the day,” she says. “I can be getting email inquiries from someone in Hong Kong at 9pm, so it is hard to have the discipline to make yourself stop in the evenings.”

THE HUMAN TOUCH

Moonah’s Jody O’Rourke was not replaced by a machine at the Claremont Cadbury factory, but he saw the writing on the wall. “It was like any factory, I guess,” he says. “They wanted to make it faster and cheaper to produce their product so they brought in new machines. Where it used to take one or two people to run each machine, now it takes one person to run two machines, so I knew it was time to get out before my job went as well.”

With further efficiency measures looming, O’Rourke took a redundancy two years ago from his job in the re-working department collecting rejected chocolates for melting and remoulding. And he thinks it was the best thing he ever did. He has retrained as a security guard and is finally following his dream of becoming a personal trainer.

But leaving his workplace of 15 years was no easy decision for the 47-year-old father of three. He left school after Year 10 and became a brickie’s labourer, but he actually had his first job at 12.

“I worked at the Shell service station at Claremont when I was in Year 7,” he says. “After being a brickie’s labourer, I worked as a trolley boy at Coles Northgate, then at Claremont Purity, then I was a barman for 15-17 years before I started at Cadbury in 2000.”

Apart from feeling a little nervous about not actually having a CV, O’Rourke tackled his post-Cadbury situation confidently.

“I was actually only out of work for about six weeks,” he says. “I did my security licence – the process takes about three weeks and costs about $1300 to do your first aid training, get your police checks and so on – and I started getting work for three different security companies pretty quickly, including security at the Hobart Airport.”

This relatively quick retraining ensured O’Rourke landed on his feet financially, but he still has one more career change in mind.

“I’m also studying to be a personal trainer,” he says. “I’ve been doing some training and gym work for 20 years on and off. Now I’m doing a course and once I’m fully qualified I want to start doing it professionally and run my own boot camps.”

O’Rourke knows others in his situation often have a harder time reorienting themselves and learning new skills for new careers, but he hopes to be an example of surviving automation: by moving into jobs only humans can do.

“I worry about other people who are made redundant and don’t know what to do with their lives, but I say to them, find something you like doing, study it, try it out, do a course, learn something new. If you don’t like it, try something else.”