STILL PAYS TO BE HUMAN

Fear not, the future will work out, Melanie Burgess writes

MANY young people worry about job security as workplaces evolve, but savvy school leavers are setting themselves up for employability well into the future by combining their passions and keeping agile.

A new Financial Consciousness Index by Deloitte and Compare the Market reveals almost half (43 per cent) of 18 to 25-year-olds are concerned about holding down a job.

Experts say the key to being employable is to prepare for constant change and jobs that may not yet exist. Business consultancy Korn Ferry’s organisational strategy practice head Andrew Lafontaine says young people need to think about what future work will look like.

“They need to start with ‘What industry do you want to work in?’ then ‘What will it look like in five to 10 years?’,” he says. “Do they even need a university program to get into some of these roles because the work is changing so quickly?”

Bond University law faculty executive dean Professor Nick James recommends school leavers planning to study law, for example, consider combining it with an IT degree.

“Those graduates are in enormous demand (in law firms),” he says. James says AI (artificial intelligence) is already having an “enormous” effect on industries such as legal services, with chat bots or lawyer bots answering simple legal questions.

“There are also more sophisticated AI tools being used by large law firms to analyse large quantities of legal documentation, such as contracts or court documents, so the sort of work that would have taken a team of young lawyers hundreds of hours to do can now be done by AI in just a few hours or a few minutes,” he says.

“Some lawyers are also using AI to analyse the decisions of judges to predict what a judge is likely to decide if a similar question comes up in a trial.”

James says new technologies are “tightening up the range of work available in traditional law firms” but also creating new types of roles, such as legal solutions architects.

“AI is unlikely to make professionals redundant but it will be an essential tool for use by professionals,” he says.

Assistant professor Sven Brodmerkel says advertising agencies use AI for customer targeting as well as creative purposes. He predicts a need for more data scientists in the sector.

“Many of these tasks can be performed by machines but then are supervised and edited at the end (by people),” Brodmerkel says. “If a student says ‘I am really interested in the design aspects’, you need to make sure they do the basic principles but also a bit of Photoshop and a little coding and data.”