Keep your career future-proof by finding out which jobs will no longer be relevant in the future.
In 1979, the British new wave band, The Buggles, released their song: “The video killed the radio star”. That one line explains exactly what happens when new technologies are created. We went from print media to the radio, from the radio to television and then from television to the internet, and as technology progresses further, old tech is almost always abandoned as a shiny new invention takes its place.
What we might not realize is that, with every piece of technology killed off, a lot of jobs are lost and a lot of new ones are created. With the arrival of televisions, the radio industry lost its relevance and the same is likely to happen with other industries in the future. If all of this talk of dying tech and disappearing jobs has suddenly made you worried about your career path, here is a list of six jobs that you need to be prepared to say goodbye to.
Telemarketers
According to Oxford University’s “The Future of Employment” study, jobs in the sales industry that require social intelligence, like telemarketing, will be computerized in the future. You must have already noticed how a lot of sales calls are automated. As of this year, 51% of businesses have automated their sales processes. As more and more businesses do so, there wouldn’t be a need for telemarketers.
Real estate agents
Buying, renting and selling houses through PropTech companies is becoming prominent in recent times, and as of 2022, PropTech has a market size of US$18.2 billion. Today, you can do almost anything virtually, from scheduling maintenance for your rental property to managing your lease and tracking rent payments. Naturally, with all of this being automated, there isn’t any need for real-life real estate agents.
Fast-food kitchen staff
Fast-food preparation is a pretty standardized process. Whether you go to McDonald’s near your house or the next town over, it will still taste the same. This makes it easy enough for companies to replace those making the food with automated kitchen staff. There are ample examples of this already happening. For instance, the Canadian startup RoboEatz has created the Autonomous Robotic Kitchen (ARK), where a robot does everything—from sorting through solid and liquid food ingredients to preparing multiple hot and cold meals. As this technology becomes more commonplace, fast-food retailers would be inclined to automate their cooking processes.
Bank tellers
Bank tellers are also one of those who are at risk of losing their jobs amidst the rise of automation. Already, we are seeing fewer people go to the bank to perform simple transactions because of services like net banking and automated teller machines (ATMs). But, as artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing automate the process of approving loans and become capable of detecting fraud, these numbers would probably go down even further. With fewer people going to the bank, the number of bank tellers required would also automatically go down.
Interpreter/ Translator
Another job that would see a major decline in the years to come is that of an interpreter or translator. Today, there are many AI interpreters that can perform the task of translating languages in real-time. For instance, Google assistant products, like Pixel buds and Google home devices, can translate language in real-time. Naturally, there is more to a language than can be captured through translation, like the intonation and nuance in which a certain word is being said. But this might change over time. An example of this is already in existence. The TrueSync AI by film tech company Flawless captures and translates the nuance of languages by subtly changing the facial expressions of the actors to make dubbed films look more realistic.
Lawyers
According to Deloitte’s “Objection Overruled” report, the legal profession has been rapidly adopting more and more technological resources— from apps, like iLegal and LawSauce, functioning as legal libraries to evidence presentation tools, like TrialPad and iAnnotate. The report prophesied that around 114,000 legal jobs are likely to be automated in the next 20 years. This would largely include the jobs of junior lawyers who have to perform repetitive tasks, like searching and verifying facts. The implementation of AI and automation would make these jobs cheaper and faster and remove the drudgery from legal practice. This essentially means that while there would still be lawyers, there wouldn’t be a need for quite as many people in the legal workforce as there are today.
While the loss of these jobs may sound all gloom and doom to you, it actually isn’t all that bad. When technology takes over one job, it creates others. Think about it this way, the more AI we use for our everyday tasks, the more jobs are being created for those in AI engineering. For reference, that field didn’t even exist 20 years ago. This article should help you think carefully about the career choices you make today so that you can easily adapt to the job market of the future.
Also read:
- 5 Jobs to Start a Career in Crypto and Blockchain
- Top 3 Jobs with the Best and Worst Work-Life Balance
- 5 PropTech Startups in APAC That Are Here to Stay
Header image courtesy of Envato
