There are new forms of work where automation and digitization are increasingly important, which implies rethinking the labor market in the future. At first, one might expect opportunities to grow, but many jobs will undoubtedly disappear or change. The International Monetary Forum (IMF) concluded in its 2020 report (when we faced the COVID-19 pandemic) that the rate of technology adoption will continue to rise and that trends from previous years will continue, such as the adoption of cloud computing, Big Data and e-commerce. Similarly, interest in coding, robotics and artificial intelligence will increase.

Artificial intelligence could affect about 300 million jobs in the world, predicts Goldman Sachs

This technological inclusion and development of these sciences will cause the transformation of tasks in companies. But it is not foreign to the world, since with the last industrial revolution, many activities performed by workers were configured to be performed by robots or machines that allowed greater flexibility and speed. A clear example was a vehicle production line, which increased its efficiency by about 60% by replacing workers with Cartesian robots.

The IMF estimates that in the near future 85 million jobs will be displaced by machines, however, 97 million new jobs will also be created adapted to the innovative division of labor between humans, machines and algorithms. In this regard, in a study conducted by the IMF, it was stated that 84% of companies are ready to digitize processes and, among other things, significantly increase remote work. Following this line, the main skills that employers will look at will be all those aimed at assimilating new functions such as critical and analytical thinking, problem solving, active learning ability, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility.

Artificial intelligence is here to stay and these are the professions that will become a trend

(…) it is estimated that around 25% of the current global workforce will have to change occupations.

Due to the increase in technology, it is estimated that about 25% of the current global workforce will have to change occupations. Another interesting aspect is that this reduction would also change the demand in other commercial sectors. For example, some studies reveal that organizations around the world plan to reduce their office space by 30%. This affects demand for restaurants and public transport, so many government and private services could be affected.

Ecuador has quite complex structural and conjunctural problems, but it is time for some government agency to pay attention to these aspects. The mix between the Ministries of Education and Labor should create a dependency that takes into account the relevance of what is described in this column. We need to focus our efforts on creating bases for the development of telemedicine, improving digital marketing roles, training cloud architects, database administrators, mobile application developers, software developers, among others. (OR)