Why your future income is at risk

There is a significant disruption in white-collar work as companies adopt artificial intelligence and use machines for most service-oriented jobs.
If you cut through the clutter and look at data, you will realise that the future of jobs is bleak.
If you cut through the clutter and look at data, you will realise that the future of jobs is bleak. Photo | Express Illustration, Mandar Pardikar
Updated on
3 min read

The chairman of engineering giant Larsen & Toubro, S N Subrahmanyan, raised a storm. When Infosys founder N R Narayan Murthy spoke about working 70 hours a week, social media got into a tizzy. Needless to say, the noise this time is even bigger than before.

The entire discourse sounds like the two sides are merely venting out. The two sides at each other are employers and employees. While the anger among employees will gain much traction due to their sheer size and social media presence, the anger among industry leaders is poorly understood.

If people like Murthy and Subramanyan, who create many white- and blue-collar jobs in the economy through their businesses, believe that employees are not productive enough, then everyone should be worried.

They sit on voluminous data on employee productivity and try to enhance employee output by bringing in new business and management strategies. If they go public with ideas like that, they see a declining employee productivity trend and cannot find a solution independently. While you may criticise their expression, it is not a good sign that they are talking like that.

If you cut through the clutter and look at data, you will realise that the future of jobs is bleak. There is a significant disruption in white-collar work as companies adopt artificial intelligence and use machines for most service-oriented jobs. In the past, technology disruptions made physical labour in farms or factories redundant.

The latest report of the World Economic Forum on the Future of Jobs comments on the situation and is enough for you to be concerned. It surveyed 1,000 leading companies worldwide across 22 industry sectors and employed over 1.4 crore workers in 55 countries, including India. It found AI and big data to be the fastest-growing skills, followed closely by networks, cybersecurity, and technology literacy.

“Complementing these technology-related skills, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, along with curiosity and lifelong learning, are also expected to continue to rise in importance over the 2025-2030 period,” the report said. Skills requiring manual effort, like clerical, administrative and call-centre jobs, could seem to decline.

Going forward, businesses will have to hire fewer people than before. However, they would look for employees with multiple skills. That would require them to train existing or new workforce extensively. Employers expect 39% of the core employee skills to change by 2030. For India, that number is 38%, which aligns with the world average. The report also warns about two other economic factors influencing future job creation. These include the cost of living (inflation) and economic slowdown.

If you look at how inflation has affected you over the past year, you will know that it is not going anywhere. The Reserve Bank of India’s monetary policy committee has held on to existing borrowing rates due to stubbornly high inflation.

At the same time, the economy is growing slower in 2024-25 than in the previous year. If you read through the management commentary of leading consumer companies during quarterly financial results, you would know that while rural India is doing fine, there is a visible decline in spending from urban consumers.

What it means to you

Most Indian companies are already adopting artificial intelligence and other new technologies, according to the World Economic Forum survey. Your finances require you to manage your income nicely. You may want to figure out the risks to your job. Signing up to learn new skills that are relevant in the future may be a good beginning.

While you do that, you cannot take your eyes off regular investing. Inflation is likely to cause economic slowdown and hurt job creation. It is also likely to eat into your future wealth.

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