Industry 4.0: Employment And Future Changes In Works Skills
Common thought and practical experience have demonstrated that automation and more in general computerization of the production process come together with a loss of the employment rate. Therefore, Industry 4. 0 is a revolution even in this. Because only a small part of companies interviewed the 9 percent that is going to introduce Industry 4. 0 is thinking to downsize his work-force. Companies in this small percentage are mostly large firms, the reason of this result is easily to find. Large companies with their financial power are able to replace easy and repeated jobs with automated robots, which are acquiring increasingly intelligence. The same can not be said for small companies that pose their basis on human capital. However, the survey give us an important and impressive result. Which is that more than half of the company surveyed foresee a rise on the level of the employment with the entire realization of Industry 4. 0. This is improvement is justified by a foresee rise of productivity and thus profitability that will be re-invested in skilled human capital.
The equation is just simple as we can think, new revenues streams correspond new jobs. Therefore, new revenues streams can be created only realizing new business models. Industry 4. 0 is able to realize this shift through impressive technologies such a 3-D printers, virtual reality and so on. The aim is to reach markets never explored before such as selling services invoice than products. In order to reach those high levels companies need skilled labor force. For instance Virtual reality can be tool to foster not the production process but the after sales service. Thus, around Industry 4. 0 there are a lot of expectation in terms of benefits, from the companies and social point view. The world can not get away this opportunity.
The perspective increase in labor demand is an important starting point to analyze which kind of attributes and skills will be required by companies in the next decade. As we have seen, easy and repeated jobs will be done by automated machines, while sophisticated and skilled jobs will rise labor demand. In the survey, 35% of the respondents foresee that they will ask to labor supply less and less workers in handmade works. Therefore, over 50% of companies interviewed will search working figures, with an academic background into specific engineers, mathematicians, physicists and so on. The final aim is to elaborate new way of working into specific new production processes based on automation and computational power based on Artificial intelligence, Big Data and Cyber Physical System.
The speech above underlines the fact that there will be a mismatch between labor demand and supply, if the job offer does not comply with the specific skills request of companies. There is a large consensus on the latter point: there will be an undersupply of engineers and scientists by 2025. In order to give a practical example, IDA, the Danish society of engineers foresee a lack of thousands of IT specialists in the next decades in Denmark.
The example mentioned above is a typical problem that companies are facing during this time, lack of technical figures able to implement Industry 4. 0. Countries can think to stem the problem taking skilled workers from foreign and under developed countries but the race for knowledge is going to become hard.
