New Zealand employers are anticipating that the continued growth in automation will drive an increase in headcount over the next two years, requiring more people and more skills. This is in contrast to the current public debate that as companies go digital, jobs will be increasingly at risk. However, it is clear that automation is happening at different speeds across the country, with key industries and functions likely to suffer while others gain.
These are the results from ManpowerGroup’s latest report – Robots Need Not Apply: Human Solutions in the Skills Revolution – which surveyed 20,000 employers across 42 countries, including over 650 in New Zealand, on the impact of automation on headcount, the functions most impacted and the soft skills that are both of greatest value and hardest to find.
In response to the impact of automation, 20 percent of New Zealand employers expect to grow their workforce while 64 percent plan to maintain current headcount over the next two years. This signals that digitisation will be a net gain for employment across New Zealand in the near-term, so long as job seekers have the right blend of skills required in today’s digital age.
Looking inside organisations, the impact of automation varies by function. Frontline and Customer-Facing roles, as well as IT functions, come out on top with anticipated headcount increases of 19 percent and 18 percent as companies start investing in the strategic combination of both human and digital skills. Contrary to this, manufacturing and production and administrative and office functions expect decreases of 17 percent and 15 percent as a result of automation.
With more and more New Zealand employers undergoing digital transformation, skills needs are constantly changing; making it difficult for companies to find the talent they need. The rise in consumerism and the value companies now place on customer service is increasingly evident and human strengths are more valued than ever before. In fact, more than half of New Zealand companies surveyed say communication skills, both written and verbal, are the hardest-to-find and the skills they now value most, followed by problem-solving and collaboration.
What workers think about artificial intelligence
With around 1.8 million industrial robots globally, the number of robots has reached a new record in factories around the world. Workers rate the fact that “colleague robots” can take over work that is detrimental to health or handle hazardous materials positively (64 percent on average). However, employees are worried about how their own training can keep up with the pace of the working world 4.0. These are the findings of the automatica Trend Index 2018. Seven thousand employees in the USA, Asia and Europe in a representative survey of the population were interviewed by a market research institute on behalf of automatica.
When it comes to their own country, only about one in four employees is convinced that training and development already plays a key role in the workplace of the future. This new collaboration with robots is regarded by the majority of all seven countries (average 68 percent) as an opportunity to master higher-skilled work. Particularly in China (86 percent) and in the USA (74 percent), people expect that robotics automation will provide added impetus to further their vocational training. The number of higher-skilled and better paid jobs will rise in the future with the new human-robot teams – according to about one in two survey respondents in Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Japan. In China and the United States, as many as 80 percent of workers presume this will be the case.
The maturity level in training and development
Based on school grades, the maturity level in training and development for the digital workplace of the future has so far fallen far short of employee expectations: with a grade of good or very good, the current offering of one’s own employer is not even rated by one in four respondents (on average 23 percent).
Robotics and automation are very popular
The companies can count on a positive basic attitude among their employees regarding robotics and automation. In the working world of the future, human-robot teams will improve manufacturing by combining human talents with the strengths of robotics – some 70 percent believe. When people and machines work hand-in-hand without a safety fence, people need talents such as judgement and fine motor skills. The robot can score with power and precision.
Sixty-four per cent of all workers from the seven countries want to use artificial intelligence (AI) for human-machine collaboration. 73 percent assume that AI makes it easier for people to assign the machine new tasks – for example, via voice command or touchpad.
*automatica Trend Index 2018 For the 2018 automatica Trend Index, a total of 7,000 employees, in the US (N = 1,000), China (N = 1,000), Japan (N = 1,000), Germany (N = 1,000), France (N = 1,000), Great Britain (N = 1,000) and Italy (N = 1,000) were interviewed in a representative survey of the population in January 2018 by a market research institute (online panel) on how robots and digitisation are changing the working world.
