People are losing jobs. Especially with the #AI disruption, many are sensing the heat. The stories of layoffs are mounting. The important question is: "What do we do? Moreover, is there anything we can do at all?"
Entry level jobs are the worst hit, as always. So one may ask: If we do not absorb freshers at entry level, how will we have the supply of the experienced people that we will need in future?
First, let us understand that this is not the first time such a disruption is happening.
Four centuries ago, just the skill of reading and writing could fetch you a well-coveted job to be a King's confide. The King dictated and you wrote the memo in your hand-writing. That memo would then be dispatched across with horsemen to another king.
Fast-forward to today: The skill to read and write is considered very basic. It does not fetch you a job. Nevertheless, this skill is essential, so that you can acquire other skills by utilizing these basic skills.
Thus, you keep acquiring layers of knowledge, stacked on top of one another, each layer utilizing the skillset in a previous layer. You keep doing it till you reach a layer that fetches you money and pays your bills.
Look at the present disruptions in the same way. The skills
A classic example is the book selling business. Amazon brought IT into this traditional brick and mortar business. The smart use of IT eliminated the need for users to visit a bookstore, enabling ordering books right from the convenience of their homes or office. The new IT based bookstore also has a smart librarian who shows the users what other users with a similar taste ordered and which books could be of interest. More importantly, it saved Amazon huge infrastructure costs. This strategy was highly successful and Amazon’s sales skyrocketed. The growth happened at the cost of traditional book sellers. Barnes and Nobles, the market leader in the business, was severely hit. Ironically, Amazon’s name came up as a strong contender to buy them out. Such is the impact of what the right use of IT can do to a traditional business.
The Amazon story is a bit dated. However, it inspired many to follow suit. Previously, it took uncommon vision to spot this kind of opportunities. Today it just takes a trained mind, since many stories are already around us.
IT is a goldmine. Be it any business, leaders need to be on the lookout of how to use IT to further their business.
A word of caution before we close. Not all IT efforts yield miraculous results, so it is important to put in place a well-thought-out strategy first. The execution is even more important, as 75% of IT projects are known to fail for one reason or another. We plan to cover these aspects in more detail in further articles.