By accelerating automation, the labor shortage could have a negative effect in the more or less long term in Canada. One in five employees works in a vulnerable, so-called high-risk occupation.
At the start of 2020, the World Economic Forum made labor conversion the central theme of its four-day summit. The report The Future of Jobs 2020, the centerpiece of the meeting, concluded with urgency, even before the pandemic accelerated “the advent of tomorrow’s work”. What used to be considered the “future of work” has now already happened, laying the foundations for Industrial Revolution 4.0, it was said.
It said that more than 80% of senior executives in global companies were accelerating the digitization of work processes and the deployment of new technologies. Of these approximately 300 large companies employing roughly speaking 8 million workers, 50% expected to increase the rate of automation of certain roles or functions. And 43% said they would have to reduce their workforce due to technology integration, compared to 34% who said they would need to increase their workforce as a result of this integration. According to these leaders, routine jobs or jobs with repetitive tasks will decline to account for only 9% of the work force in 2025, against 19.5% in 2020. In the meantime, the weight of emerging professions would increase from 7, 8% to 13.5%.
“By 2025, employers will divide work equally between humans and machines,” the report said, while estimating that half of workers who will stay in their jobs will need retraining related to their basic skills.
Technological unemployed
Digitization, robotization, automation and artificial intelligence will cause their share of technological unemployment and will raise a crying problem of employability, a phenomenon which is likely to be felt more in the service sector and in trades involving repetitive tasks. We therefore want it to be largely mitigated by labor force adjustment, reskilling and skills development programs.
Several figures have already circulated. According to a review by the Institut du Québec (IdQ) made in 2018, for Canada, an OECD assessment places the risk of almost complete automation at 9.2% of jobs, while 23.5% should experience great changes, for a total of 32.7%. For its part, the Brookfield Institute for Innovation in Toronto estimates that 42% of Canadian workers are very at risk from automation in the next 10 or 20 years, while the CD Howe Institute advanced that 45.1% of jobs are exposed to automation and that 33.5% are at risk of being victims of it.
These proportions are similar across Quebec, with 45.6% and 34% respectively. Same observation for Brookfield, which makes it possible to extrapolate that 1.73 million Quebec jobs would be affected by digitization and robotization. The IdQ speaks for its part of the elimination, reduction and partial or total reassignment of 1.4 million positions in Quebec by 2030.
Automation risk
The Green Career Paths analysis paper released Wednesday, written by the Conference Board of Canada in partnership with the Future Skills Centre, suggests that one in five employed Canadians work in a job that poses a significant risk of automation. This represents 3.5 million people in 92 professions. For these employees working in a so-called high-risk, low-mobility vulnerable occupation, “there are few or no options for re-orientation towards lower-risk occupations without intensive retraining”. Same proportion in Quebec, which is home to nearly 877,000 people exercising a vulnerable profession, or 19.1% of the total number of jobs.
And the green shift will only be able to meet part of the needs resulting from the transition. According to Conference Board forecasts, across Canada, there will be
27 high-growth green jobs for every 100 vulnerable jobs by 2030. The estimated measure for Quebec is 24 percent. “Almost all vulnerable occupations can move into the clean economy after a year of training. However, many professions offer only limited opportunities for transition with training of six months or less. »
More broadly, skills gaps will continue to grow as technology is adopted. “In all current professions, physical and manual work as well as basic cognitive skills occupy about half of the total working time. This type of skill will certainly be less in demand in the future with the automation of production processes and technological advances, illustrates the magazine Forbes. Conversely, the world of work will require deeper social and emotional skills as well as technological skills. In total, these two skill areas account for less than a third of current working time,” but are expected to increase by 20% over the next ten years.
There is still a big hurdle to overcome. In Conference Board analysis, nearly two in five workers believe they lack the skills needed to succeed in a new profession.