Jobs Going into Extinction; An appeal to pity

Have you ever seen the image above on social media? it seems to be a trending picture and you might have seen some truth in it, didn’t you ? Now on a second thought, Do you really think the decision to buy from humans rather than machines is a personal choice? It appears to me more like a lifestyle change that has come upon this fast paced generation and road side hawkers, may have to start finding other jobs that machine cannot do; the same applies to some operations staff in banks or any organisation.

Take this as a case in point; you are having a very important chat on whatsapp with a friend you have lost contact with for over a decade and your data goes off. It’s 10:00pm in your very serene estate. You have a choice to either take the risk or discomfort of going out that time of the night, out of pity for the roadside recharge card merchants or dial *909*Amount H  and get recharged in seconds. What would you do ?  Will it be unfair on the ‘poor’ bus driver if I decide to check my account balance online at no cost rather than get on board a bus to my bank to check the same account balance?

Consider a business owner who owns a factory that did manual bottling of water some years back. Some casual workers were engaged to do this task and there comes a machine that does 50 bottles per minute, eliminating the cost of the casual workers that perform ed that task in the past, will it be smart of the business man to save the jobs of the casual workers and leave his organization operating below optimum capacity?

Truth is, some of the tellers in the banking halls today are quickly being replaced with ATM machines. The future of banking is the digital branch. Stanbic IBTC bank launched its first digital branch on December 14, 2016, where you can carry out your banking operations without human intervention or with the help of a single human  sitting at the customer contact center and interfacing through the Personal Teller Machine. This eliminates the need for at least about 10 branch staff that would have been hired for a typical small branch.

The truth is that some careers are fast going into extinction and anyone in these career lines has to begin to think of other ways to either stay relevant or change their job completely. We are in a jet age where everything is constantly changing quickly and the most important attributes everyone will have to develop is the ability to change quickly with the changing trends. Remember the popular saying, readers are leaders. That’s why leading organizations don’t joke with staff training and re-training.

It is important for those who technology is catching up with their job to begin to consider other ways to earn. Most people will latch on the excuse of accessibility of training and give excuses on why they cannot meet up. This defines one of the reasons why we started    D-Pia Innovations last year. It’s a social enterprise set up to drive inclusive ICT skill acquisition and provide ICT support to SMEs. We gave partial and full scholarship to about 50 youths last year and the cost of acquiring ICT skills has been drastically dropped to ensure no one has an excuse to stay on the disadvantaged side of the digital divide.

Well, I will try to patronize the road side recharge card hawkers when I can, but I cannot promise I always will. Can you promise ? Let me know your thought, drop a comment below.