Watch the jobs disappear

Get a nice, safe job in staid, constant business, your parents might have said. Maybe try a career in banking. They might have said it in the 1990s; it’s not glamorous, but banks make money and the jobs will always be there.

Well, suddenly there were fewer banking jobs, and now there might be even fewer than even just a year ago. A lot fewer.

Canada’s banks may be doing well financially, but automation and artificial intelligence are expected to take a huge bite out of jobs in the industry. Even though the numbers of staff started to shrink dramatically decades ago with the increasing use of automatic banking machines and the advent of electronic banking, industry experts now expect more than 30 per cent of the current jobs in the industry will significantly change or outright disappear in the next 10 years. Internationally, that’s already started; forecasts in the U.S. expect that 200,000 jobs in the industry will disappear, and large international banks like Barclays PLC and Deutsche Bank AG are already shedding thousands.

The problem is that automation is tailor-made for back office, mundane banking tasks and wages and benefits are a cost centre ripe for reductions.

That’s a hard message for the 275,000 people working in Canadian banks.

But it’s also a hard message for everyone else, especially if your job is fundamentally centred on repetitive tasks, like shifting and reviewing documents, whether they are on paper or are formatted electronically.

The banks may be a bellwether, because so much of their business is shuffling paper or adjusting numbers, but other white-collar businesses are expected to see significant changes, too. But perhaps none as much as the manufacturing sector, where consulting firm Oxford Economics last June predicted a loss of up to 20 million jobs worldwide by 2030.

Still, the banks are even warning other industries about the coming job upheaval — an RBC report in 2018 suggested that 50 per cent of jobs in Canada will be “disrupted by automation in the next 10 years.” There will still be jobs, but they will need different skills — for example, “critical thinking, co-ordination, social perceptiveness, active listening and complex problem solving.”

It’s funny that we just went through a federal election where nothing about the coming change was part of the policy discussion. Even though the rise of the machines is being described as a new industrial revolution, there weren’t many signs that any of the federal parties were setting policies to address an issue that will affect so many Canadians and their paycheques.

If the job market is about change significantly, then the way we train young Canadians coming into the workforce, and the way we help people forced out of the workforce, is going to have to change significantly, too.

And you can take that to the ATM.