The Robot Redundancy Roulette: A Hopeful & Proactive Betting Guide

The world of work is changing at a pace never experienced by previous generations, requiring the need to fundamentally adapt and evolve how we work within the space of years rather than decades.

If you are middle-aged right now, it is highly likely that the role you retire from has not even been invented yet.  Unless you are right in the midst of the world of Artificial Intelligence, it is a gamble as to whether your job will still require a human to perform it in 5 years time.  So do you bet on the red or the black?

If you don’t fancy becoming a coder, here are 5 tips to tilt the roulette table in your favour in the event your profession rolls some ‘do we/don’t we automate?’ dice in the future:

1)       Don’t be panda, be more fox: Aim to cultivate a fluid skillset rather than a fixed job role to avoid becoming a loved but obselete species. As routine jobs become increasingly automated it will require us to be flexible in our skills to avoid becoming extinct within our chosen profession.

2)       Don’t let a solid CV solidify: go for breadth not depth unless your chosen area has significant barriers to entry e.g. requiring wisdom or practice that cant be Googled.

3)       Activate your job DNA: The quicker you can identify and define the DNA (Do Not Automate) elements of your job (professional or personal), the wiser your decisions about technology to support you will be. Automate the dull, dirty, routine or dangerous aspects so you can free up ‘you’.

4)       Don’t be (an expensive) robot:  Bring your work to life through care, collaboration, curiousity and creativity (for these 4C’s are trickier to automate better than a human).

5)       Take hope if you’re not a techie: There will be an active robot-related job market, but also there will be a whole series of job roles that only humans can do.

Only you can decide if you consider the prospect of a digital future with more machines something to dread or hope for, but one thing is certain: we are the last generation who get to make these first choices.  We may be raising Generation Alpha on our iPads but lets also look up from our iPhones and at least make these choices, conscious.

P.S. The robots are coming… Wake up, smell the silicon and start tilting the robot redundancy roulette table in your favour now.

Laura Thomson-Staveley is founder and leadership coach at Phenomenal Training and co-host of Secrets from A Coach podcast. For more information visit: phenomenaltraining.com and secretsfromacoach.com