Future of jobs and entrepreneurship: Running to stand still

By Rekha Sethi

The economy is churning and the familiar work and businesses are under the threat of being upended. Ever-new technologies, new market priorities, and supply chain compulsions are forcing businesses into structural and cultural reinvention. As a result, a lot of the people who work for a living are seeing their hard-earned specialization getting outmoded and their roles getting devalued.

According to World Economic Forum’s latest Future of Work Report, employers around the world expect a quarter of the labour market to churn over the next five years with a net destruction of 2% of the present jobs and extinction of nearly half the present worker skills. However, the study has found that the earlier anxiety of automation taking away jobs in a rush has proved unfounded, and since 2020, there has been only 1% increase in the business tasks that are performed by machines.

The role of automation

Nevertheless, the spectre of automation continues to hang over jobs, especially in the cognitive work. The generative AI has exploded on the scene and it promises to alter knowledge work. This technology is expected to become more potent and pervasive once it clears the legal and moral hurdles, and in coming months and years, most analytical and creative jobs would require competence in mastering this new-fangled tool. The future is about ceding many of the current jobs to machines and creating new ones around feeding them intelligence and extracting decisions from them.

A large number of job-intensive sectors are likely to see substantial changes in the nature and the quantum of jobs in coming years. According to the WEF study, supply chain, transportation, media, entertainment and sports will have considerable job churn. However, the study indicates that manufacturing, retail and wholesale businesses may see relatively less job turbulence. The volume growth in jobs would come in education, agriculture, digital commerce and trade sectors over the next five years, the study says.

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ESG compulsion would be another driver of change in jobs and entrepreneurship in the foreseeable future. Globally, politics is becoming increasingly sensitive to climate change, diversity and human rights and it is seeping into regulation of industry and trade. Green innovation and production skills would be in great demand in coming years as energy, transportation, consumer goods and technology sectors face tremendous popular pressure to reduce their impact on the environment and health. Compliance with moral and geopolitical compulsions across varied supply chains and markets would keep businesses extremely worried and busy in the time to come. New, critical jobs are expected to proliferate in this area, especially among global companies.

A major generational shift in the economy would be in the shape of the coupling of jobs and entrepreneurship. The division between entrepreneurship and jobs is beginning to disappear, as employees are expected to bring an entrepreneurial mindset to their roles and employees themselves see their jobs as the training ground for future entrepreneurship. Risk has come to jobs and entrepreneurship offers better rewards for hard work.

The lure of entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is becoming more alluring as media celebrates newly minted billionaires every day and investors are willing to spread their bets wide in the quest for landing a unicorn. Technology has made entrepreneurship more accessible to the working class and it has become possible to start and scale a business with minimal assets and geographic footprint. The future also holds the tantalizing prospect of virtual jobs and businesses in the meta-economies that are currently in the works.

Entrepreneurship is the future of jobs, as it is becoming a viable career option for anyone with business skills and monetizable ideas. With growing acceptance of venture and failure as sources of future success, there would be seamless movement between jobs and entrepreneurship in the coming years.

The churn in technology, consumer habits, political priorities, and economic structures is changing the future continuously and the resulting fears and hopes would shape the future of jobs and entrepreneurship. In this environment, the fastest learner will be naturally selected to inherit the future.

(The writer is director-general AIMA. Views expressed are personal.)