Eliminate Automate Offshore: Why our careers are facing extinction

Copyright © 2016 by Rob Gaunt

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations.

ISBN 978-0-9953712-1-7

www.eliminateautomateoffshore.com

ELIMINATE

AUTOMATE

OFFSHORE

Why Our Careers

Are Facing Extinction

Rob Gaunt

Preface

If you are too young to remember or perhaps the parent of someone who is too young to remember a time when the only two types of telephones weren’t Android or Apple but those connected to the wall in your house and those in phone booths, then this book is for you.

Unless you’re independently wealthy, at some point you’ll find yourself having to choose a career path. It would be a good idea to select one that is likely to still be around in 10, 15 and 20 years’ time because, as this book explains, most won’t be.

If you don’t believe me, next time you take a flight ask one of the cabin crew for the name of the navigator…..

The key to selecting a career with longevity can be summarised as follows:

There is only a future for careers in expensive economies where the value or quality of local knowledge or presence outweighs the cost advantage of every other method of performing the task.

This book is not a how-to guide. It is a skip through the recent history of work with a look forward to the future and is designed to be thought-provoking.

No one can predict the future. Nevertheless, we should all be preparing for it. The following pages might just help.

Contents

Preface 5

Introduction 7

Chapter 1 - A new industrial revolution is

building a new economy 10

Chapter 2 - Eliminate 27

Chapter 3 - Automate 37

Chapter 4 - Offshore 56

Chapter 5 - Don’t look to the government for help 89

Chapter 6 - Work categories still in danger 116

Chapter 7 - Which jobs might remain? 119

Chapter 8 - Skills Your Children Will Need 128

Chapter 9 - What to do if you’ve already

chosen a doomed career 136

Introduction

As parents, we want to give our children the benefit of our experiences and the insights we’ve learned over our lives. But what if those experiences bear little relation to the world they will grow up in?

If, like me, you suspect this might be the case, read on.

For the last decade and a half I have worked as an independent management consultant advising client organisations on how to cut costs. In large organisations, one of the biggest costs is the workforce.

Every organisation that doesn’t have access to an unlimited source of money (i.e. taxes) must constantly strive to employ fewer people and find ways to ensure the remaining staff are more productive.

This is what I do. In other words, I’m a corporate axe-man, the toe-cutter, the most disliked person in the company. You may not approve of or like what I do but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

I don’t take pleasure in firing people and I try to do it in the most professional and sympathetic way possible, but if the role is no longer economically viable, it is going to be made redundant by me or someone else.

My mortgage is paid by me, not someone else, giving the bad news to people. So that’s what I do.

Like many people, I’ve come to the conclusion over recent years that the world of work is going to be very different to the one my generation faced when we left school and college. What was considered an honourable, prestigious or safe profession may be unrecognisable or might not even exist in the new world of work. In the meantime, schools and universities are still teaching a curriculum that, for the most part, a pupil of 30 years ago would have recognised and understood.

Despite this, jobs are disappearing in front of our eyes. We can find examples everywhere we look;

• Unskilled labour - my local council waste collection vehicle now uses a hydraulic arm which lifts and tips the bin in to the truck. Five years ago that used to be 4 people per vehicle to move the bin to the back of the truck. Fifteen years ago, a team of perhaps eight to 10 men used to physically lift the bins from the roadside to the back of the truck. Now it’s an additional task for the driver, and one for which he’s not paid significantly more to perform (certainly not the salaries of the nine missing team members).

• Semi-skilled labour – the newspaper you no longer read in paper form doesn’t require a typesetter. The relatively few printed copies sold require barely any humans in the production process. These were jobs which used to offer apprenticeships and were considered safe career options. So much so that many newspaper print rooms were closed shops, that is, the union determined who could and couldn’t be hired in to new vacancies and the best jobs were bequeathed from father to son.

• Highly-skilled labour – There is one less job on board modern aircraft from their equivalent in the 1980s. The navigator used to have a dedicated seat in the cockpit of a commercial airplane and was paid well for the skills and experience required to keep the pilot flying on the correct course. Nobody has the job title navigator in modern airlines because the function is now performed by a slight glance at the GPS display by the pilot or co-pilot.

My work provides a unique insight into many of the factors driving the changes to the future workforce.

When I think about what my children might do for a living in the future, I think about the jobs I currently can’t eliminate, automate or send offshore.

What is special about these jobs?

Is it just a matter of time before these are no longer required, can be undertaken by a machine or can be performed to an acceptable level of quality in a lower cost economy?

If not, why not?

Perhaps these are the jobs I should encourage my children to aim for.

Chapter 1

A new industrial revolution is building a new economy

A history of humans in three revolutions

The earliest evidence suggests Homo Sapiens evolved around 160,000 years ago. Assuming that a generation has a duration of between 20 and 30 years, we can estimate that there have been around 5,500 generations of our species so far.

The first 5,000 of these survived in an exclusively hunter/gatherer existence. Life and death occurred along roughly the same pattern from father to son, mother to daughter for much of human history; following the herds, picking fruits and berries and living at the mercy of the seasons and the climate.

Ignoring climatic and dietary differences, this existence was common across every continent inhabited by humans.

Then, around 11,500 years ago, modern agriculture was invented and, for the last 500 or so generations, our lives changed to follow a different pattern; waking at dawn, tending the fire, tilling the crops, feeding the animals, perhaps hand-spinning yarn and weaving thread for clothes and settling down at sunset until the following day.

With few exceptions, children could expect to have the same pattern of life as their parents across these modern generations.

Between 1760 and 1840, new discoveries and inventions permanently changed how humans would live.

The previous certainty that what you did to survive or earn a living would be very similar to what your children would do was replaced with the inverse statement as an almost certainty; the work routines of the next generation were practically guaranteed to be very different to their parents’ generation.

People living at the start of what we now call The Industrial Revolution, roughly 10 generations ago, were only the second generation of humans in history to experience this.

We are now the third generation in human history to experience such a massive upheaval to our pattern of life. To emphasise this point, we have become the first generation where urban dwellers outnumber rural dwellers; this switch occurred around 2007.¹

The changes we are currently living through will have as much impact on human existence as the discovery of techniques to cultivate grain or the invention of the spinning jenny.

Interestingly, despite our acceptance of the many benefits of these changes, many of us are blithely unaware or uninterested at the enormity of the upheaval to human existence and the implications to our descendants’ lives.

Look again at the rate of acceleration of these revolutions in human existence. The number of generations living in an age of relative certainty are reducing exponentially from the evolution of the species to the present day; 5,000 generations, 500 generations, 10 generations, the current generation.

Taking as an example the manufacture of clothing, we can see how these human