It's time to prepare for work in the age of automation, say experts

Automation is going to bring many changes to the job market over the next 10 years, but some experts believe that if employees are educated for the new reality, it won't be as disruptive as one might think.

Sean Mullin, executive director of the Brookfield Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, said there are two things to keep an eye on in Alberta's job market — changes that will impact North America as a whole (industries like retail sales and trucking), and those that will impact the segments of Alberta's economy that are specific to the province, like oil and gas.

• Retailers embrace self-service technology, at the expense of jobs
• Leaner oilpatch emerges from recession as new technology replaces jobs

When people consider the impacts of automation on jobs, they often think of mechanical replacements, like robots, Mullin says.

But that can be a misconception.

"You don't need to have a physical machine, it could be a computer service that lives in the cloud and schedules someone's calendar and that replaces the need to have a secretary or administrative assistant," he told CBC's Alberta@Noon on Thursday. 

"You see the range of technological advances that are all having an impact and what we're putting under the same heading that we call automation."

'Producing more with less labour'

Mullin said that 100 years ago, half of Canada's workforce was employed on family farms. Today, less than two per cent of Canadians work in agriculture — but their output is nearly 10 times what it was.

"So that's a net good thing. We're producing more, with less labour, we're creating higher living standards, people are better off.

"Overall, technology has been a source of job creation over the years, even though it's also disrupted people."

But, that disruption does have risks.

Both exciting and scary

Mullin said that if the pace of technological and economic advances continues to increase simultaneously, it could disrupt such a large segment of the labour market that a huge portion of the population could have difficulty finding jobs — especially when factoring in other technology-assisted changes to the market, like the emergence of the gig economy and a shift to outsourcing.

"It's exciting times, yes it can be scary, but it's exciting as well," said Krista Uggerslev, applied research chair in leadership and talent at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.

Uggerslev told CBC News the nature of education is changing from a skill-based learning to teaching students competencies.

Rather than simply making sure students have facts and figures memorized, educators now focus on teaching abilities like problem solving, decision making, critical thinking and creativity, that can be applied to numerous careers. 

"We've seen business education move from fact- and figure-based, to many more case examples, what were the particular environmental or contextual factors that people needed to consider within certain contexts as they made decisions about what to do next?" she said.

Mullin agreed, and told CBC that Uggerslev's findings match up with research he's done at Brookfield.

"When we started to look at what were some of the commonalities among the occupations that were least at risk we started to see skillsets emerge that included the ability to work with technology to solve problems, whether that's a coder, a computer scientist, or someone like a digital marketer, the ability to work with humans, to interact …

"How we can build a basket of resilient skills so that even when there's change in the labour market, people will be able to move from job to job."

One skill employees may want to learn to be prepared for a changing work environment — and one Uggerselv is encouraging her own children to practice — is coding.

"Learning those languages like Java and Python, that are ubiquitous now within coding, are going to become something that's just standard protocol as we move forward."

• MORE CALGARY NEWS | Calgary 'quite a long shot' for Amazon HQ2, betting company says
• MORE CALGARY NEWS | Natural gas industry in 'precarious' position as prices dive

With files from Alberta@Noon