Expanding your skill set
BESIDES ICT and programming skills, findings from the Australian Digital Pulse 2017 report noted that our workforce of tomorrow are expected to have more creative, innovative, collaborative and analytical skills.
According to Wong, this was to be expected as creativity and innovation will be prized in the future, being something that AI technology cannot replicate.
Analytical skills will be highly sought after in all walks of life as data derived from AI tech will need to be analysed.
For collaborative skills, Magid explained that continued advancements in technology and its implementation in all industries will begin to blur the lines between traditional Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematical (STEM) jobs and jobs from other faculties.
“In the future, I expect jobs will be performed by teams of people in different disciplines working together because if you have only one type of person to do it, it is going to be really hard as they might lack the right expertise.
“For example, if you have a mechanical engineer who knows about hardware, a software engineer who know how to program, and someone from agriculture who really knows the industry, you can have all those people collaborate and create solutions that really make sense,” she explained.
Following this, she shared that that IBM who also provides education and training services locally, has also been encouraging local universities to promote collaboration among their students from different kinds of faculties.
“I am a big believer of communities and people doing things together,” she mused.
While both Wong and Magid brought some solace that majority of our skilled jobs will not turn obsolete but rather just experience a change of scope, there is still the issue of diminishing number of jobs.
From the WEF report, current trends in technology could lead to a net employment impact of more than 5.1 million jobs lost to disruptive labour market changes between 2015 to 2020.
These losses of 7.1 million jobs are mostly concentrated in the office and administrative job family while the two million gains in jobs are mostly in the categories of Computer and Mathematical, and Architecture and Engineering.
While the estimated 5.1 million figure of job loss may seem daunting, some argue that it is merely the current industries and economies becoming more streamlined in their operations, and that newer industries and enterprises that have not been created yet will likely come to rise to help offset the total amount of job losses.
What this means is that society will likely balance itself out to accommodate for themselves, but if you want more job security for yourself, pursuing a career in Computer and Mathematical or Architecture and Engineering jobs would be ideal.
However, the issue with this lies in the fact that women worldwide traditionally hold more Office and Administrative or Education and Training jobs while men hold more Computer and Mathematical or Architecture and Engineering jobs.
And if no intervention is done to help encourage more women into pursuing STEM related jobs and professions, we may likely see a larger gender gap in the workforce going forward.
To this, Magid advocates for Malaysia to overcome this by upholding the current women in our STEM industries.
“During my visits to Malaysia, we met a lot of women in business and government who have ended up starting their own companies, so I don’t think there’s a lack of ambition here.
“There should be a focus on finding a good role model for young girls to look up to, so they can have the confidence to do well in technical businesses as founders of start-ups,” she reasoned.
Suggesting a potential role model, Magid pointed out that mechanical engineer and cofounder of Grabcar, Tan Hooi Ling, would be an ideal candidate as she has demonstrated that women can be highly successful too in the male dominated tech world.
And in addition as women in STEM jobs have been found to earn 33 per cent more than women in non-stem jobs, it is expected that the gender wage gap will close up even more as more women enter STEM jobs.