Up to the moment that Covid-19 blew apart the entire model by which humanity expressed itself in every aspect of our daily lived experience, nobody could have foreseen what was about to occur.
We were already living in a world of disorientating rapid technological change, where whole industries were being transformed, wiping out millions of jobs overnight. It was a very frightening place for all those seeking to secure or maintain a foothold in today’s labour market.
A speaker from MIT, at a conference I attended pre-Covid-19, described the economic world we then lived in as one of “creative destruction," which perfectly captured the dynamic that was driving the economic world we then inhabited.
Then the Covid-19 bomb exploded and we are all still cowering in our homes, wondering what the world we will emerge into when the vaccines we will all receive in the next six to nine months liberate us, and allow us to begin the process of building a post Covid-19 world, will look like.
What is absolutely clear is that the genius of human creativity has been working in overdrive in every corner of the planet for almost a year now, to enable human social and economic activity to continue in a non-face-to-face form, thus avoiding societal collapse. This creativity has transformed entire industries as new ways were developed to keep economic activity functioning.
When we finally push the Covid-19 virus back down the rabbit hole and begin to lose the fear of contracting the disease, we will emerge into a transformed world, in which the roles and functions of economic life will gradually emerge as from the morning mist.
A new normal
In most developed economies, of which Ireland is one of the most advanced on the planet, many of the emergency measures introduced to cope with living with the virus, will become the norm in our new working world.
Pre-Covid-19 we were already living in a world in which the services sector of the economy was over 80 per cent in value terms.
Astonishingly, the PAYE tax take from the entire economy in 2020 was only fractionally down on 2019. This was proof that the vast majority of the service economy continued to operate efficiently, based on the activity of home-based workers.
Whereas previously the default position was that all workers crawled out of their beds around seven every morning, and spent the next two hours crawling slowly in traffic to their place of work, the new default position may well be that workers will log onto their devices from home at a time which is mutually agreed with their employer, and only go to a place of work to engage in face to face meetings for structured interactions which are considered necessary to maintain the creative dynamic of a particular team of workers. This might only happen on a once a week basis, leaving the vast majority of economic activity based at home.
When the 500,000 homes currently being connected to high speed broadband are fully connected in three to four years’ time, any location in Ireland will be able to link into the wider online economy. This will disperse wealth back to more rural areas, where quality of life issues will draw many creative people. This will drive a multiplier effect in less developed parts of our country, creating jobs for those servicing the newly arrived highly paid workers.
At another level we can already see that huge volumes of physical trade has gravitated to online shopping during the pandemic and An Post, which was on its knees financially a few years ago, is now carrying huge volumes of parcel post.
Cash and the presence of physical banks on every main street are historical relics of a bygone age and have been bypassed technologically by smart phones throughout Africa, and in other less developed parts of our planet.
China has moved in one generation from a mainly rural peasant society to a predominantly urban one in which cutting edge technology shapes everyone’s daily life experience. The new cities which are being built from scratch to accommodate tens of millions of new urban dwellers are wonders of modern technology.
It is clear therefore that even before Covid-19 arrived that our future was already a fully developed reality in some emerging economies which don’t have the problem of integrating technological change down on top of pre-existing infrastructure, where resistance to change on the part of existing workers will slow down the pace of change for developed economies such as ours.
What does all this mean for our children as they contemplate their career choices?
How does one even begin to sketch out a career path as a school leaver, a third level student, or an adult looking at their job disappearing under the steamroller of technological change?
As a parent or guidance counsellor how does one help those researching their career options in such a rapidly changing world?
Reflecting on the history of man’s engagement with work, more new jobs are created through economic advancement, than are lost in the process.
Having spent 16 summers in California in the late eighties and nineties, I was amazed to encounter people whose job it was to manage other people’s domestic lives, down to doing the supermarket shopping, dealing with all utility bills, children’s dental and medical appointments, etc. Others spend their days caring for clients' dogs and more exotic animals. In today’s Ireland, such work roles do not seem all that exotic.
Technological advancement does not destroy national income, it creates additional wealth, which has the potential to make life better for people.
The biggest problem confronting workers and families today is that the relationship between wealth creation and wages broke down in and around 1980, when wages stagnated but corporate profits continued to grow rapidly in the new companies which emerged out of our online world.
Brexit, Trump, and Yellow Vest protests in Paris were society's way of protesting at the stagnation of workers incomes, before Covid-19 snuffed out their protests.
The fact that Ireland has not experienced such a kickback, is that as the corporate headquarters of many high technological companies amassing huge profits, we are the beneficiaries of these corporate tax strategies.
These profits from high tech companies based in Ireland increased hugely over the past year as their workers operated from home and did wonders for our tax take as a country.
Nothing ever stays unchanged for long, and through the OECD or other worldwide regulatory bodies, the wealth created by technological advancement will be more equitably distributed to workers, which will in time drive the creation of new more secure well-remunerated jobs.
Job seekers may be filled with anxiety at the pace of economic advancement today, but they should not be fearful at all. People will continue to gravitate towards the broad fields of interest that they do today.
People persons will seek out roles where they engage face to face with others as an integral part of their work. Outdoor types will find new ways of working, which will involve caring for our planet and nursing it back to a sustainable future. Technologists will continue to create new products to enrich or disrupt our lives. Roles will change but our basic instincts will remain the same.
Those of us whose job it is to help others to navigate their way through this maze, should focus our energies on helping our clients identify their inner motivations, interests, and aptitudes, and help them to identify the broad areas in which those strengths find an outlet in our ever-changing world of work.
It is the responsibility of sites such as careersportal.ie to continue to highlight the specific roles in which different careers types find expression in today’s economy.
