McKinsey estimates that between now and 2030, 75 to 375 million workers need to switch jobs that will require new skills and new education just due to automation and tech disruption:

“In terms of magnitude, it’s akin to coping with the large-scale shift from agricultural work to manufacturing that occurred in the early 20th century in North America and Europe, and more recently in China. But in terms of who must find new jobs, we are moving into uncharted territory.

Those earlier workforce transformations took place over many decades, allowing older workers to retire and new entrants to the workforce to transition to the growing industries.  But the speed of change today is potentially faster. The task confronting every economy, particularly advanced economies, will likely be to retrain and redeploy tens of millions of midcareer, middle-age workers.”^[i]

We have been involved in recent automation projects.  While automation has been going on for years, it’s picked up speed over the last five years in more sectors.  What surprises us is the breadth and depth of automation.

This is also occurring in the US, China, India, and most parts of the world.  For example, one of China’s big e-commerce companies, has a warehouse in Shanghai that where 4 engineers service all the robots in a mega fulfillment center.  Amazon also has an  army of more than 100,000 robots that displace humans.

“Every company is a tech company” is attributed to Xerox PARC CEO Stephen Hoover, speaking at a Fast Company Conference.  This expression is getting a lot of play the past few years as established companies realize they must transform their ‘brick and mortar’ business model to an online model to thrive or even just survive.

^[i] ‘Retraining and Reskilling Workers in the Age of Automation’, McKinsey Global Institute, January 2018.

Bio:

Greg Hutchins is the author of the upcoming Working It: Disruption Rules book.