What jobs have grown the fastest over the last decade?
Technology is clearly shaping the future of work. Many of the jobs most at risk of automation experienced a decline over the last decade, particularly in retail and back office administration. While jobs in tech, the creative industries, and professional services that are harder to automate experienced growth.
There are some exceptions to this trend, with jobs in sectors like hospitality and logistics experiencing growth, despite being at high risk of automation, likely due to changing patterns of consumer behaviour: the rise of the experience economy and e-commerce. We’ve also seen strong growth in jobs in health and social care in keeping with changing demographics, particularly that of an ageing, ailing population.
Has the pandemic accelerated the pace of technological change?
Covid-19 has accelerated the pace of technological change in some sectors. For example, the growth of e-commerce in retail during the early waves of the pandemic represented years of digital transformation in months. This will continue to shift the occupational structure of the industry away from customer service roles and towards warehousing and logistics jobs.
In health and education there has also been a rise in telemedicine and a shift to teaching online through platforms such as Zoom. While remote working is now prolific across the knowledge economy. Like automation, these shifts could have an impact on job availability, reducing the need for cleaning, security and building maintenance staff, as well as transport and hospitality staff that serve commuters.
But Covid-19 could also create new winners and losers, with some industries that are more resilient to technological change such as the creative arts and entertainment, film production and air travel and tourism having been hit particularly hard by the pandemic.
Are particular (demographic) groups of workers more at risk?
Several studies find a U-shaped relationship between automation and age, but younger workers are by far the most at risk. They are also represented in many of the industries hardest hit by Covid-19. The impacts on gender are more complicated and differ across studies. For example, the OECD suggests that historically automation has disproportionately impacted jobs typically held by men such as those in manufacturing with women more likely to work in sectors such as health and education which are more resilient.
However, previous RSA research on changes in the UK labour market over the last decade suggests that women have borne the brunt of jobs losses as well as missing out on the best-paid new hi-tech roles. The challenge of gender diversity in digital is well documented, with women currently only accounting for 18 percent of ICT specialists in the EU.
How can we support workers at risk transition into the jobs of the future?
In Sweden, employers pay into funds to provide workers with an end-to-end transition service, following collective redundancies. Organisations known as Job Security Councils are set up through collective agreements between unions and employers to provide displaced workers with information about their local labour market, as well as coaching, training opportunities and financial compensation. This makes Sweden’s economy more dynamic. Businesses can more easily shed unproductive labour because unions can support job cuts, knowing that workers will be protected.
France has personal learning accounts, which give all workers (including the self- employed) annual training credits that they can spend on accredited courses. Personal learning accounts are a portable benefit, independent from employment arrangements – meaning the credits accrued are retained by workers even if they move jobs or become unemployed.
Promising digital innovations in skills, training and lifelong learning are also emerging, including boot camps that teach people how to code and digital career coaching platforms that use machine learning to offer workers personalised coaching and labour market information. Alongside top-down policy changes we see a clear role for innovators to shape the future of work. More traditional approaches may prove challenging and costly to scale in an age where automation increases demand for reskilling. While digital platforms may also be able to enhance government services by making them more accessible and user friendly.
What is the RSA’s Future of Work programme?
The RSA has a long and distinguished history in the area of good work; in 1805, the RSA’s Gold Medal was awarded to an inventor who developed a piece of equipment which meant chimneys could be cleaned without the need to send small boys up to sweep them, something which frequently resulted in injury, illness or death. Since then we have remained committed to the creation of good work and to developing a deep understanding of the world of work and the trends and shifts in behaviour and technology which impact on it. The RSA seeks to resolve the challenges of our time by uniting people and ideas to create impact. One of the great challenges faced by society today is that work is no longer a guarantee of economic security; powerful new technologies, like artificial intelligence, mean the future of work could be even more unequal in terms of power and opportunity. Our future of work programme exists to make sure that everyone, regardless of background or starting point, can pursue good work in this age of technological change because we believe good work should be enjoyed by all. Our principles for good work – economic security, wellbeing, growth, freedom, subjective nurture – are not ambitious in their own right; many people already experience these. However, our ambition is for these principles to be available to all. The RSA’s Future of Work programme brings diverse people and ideas together to influence a new future of work.
