Ogenes
Carefully read the prompt Where are all the Jobs? I NEED TO WRITE…
Carefully read the prompt Where are all the Jobs?
I NEED TO WRITE Introductory Paragraph in response to Where are all the Jobs? that uses the FIRST FIVE items in the checklist (all of those that apply to the Introductory Paragraph)
Where are All the Jobs? by Colin Spaun
Self-driving delivery trucks, robots that perform surgery,
virtual travel agents: these are but three examples that prove
how much the job market has changed. Fanshawe College
must accept that going to school for vocational trainingthat
is, for practical, hands-on training to fill a specific labour need
is outdated and unhelpful. Indeed, Fanshawe College should
replace its vocational programming with academic
programming (the study of subjects like literature, history, and
psychology) in order to prepare students for the current,
future, and, even, the speculative job market.
As the examples above demonstrate, the current job market is
already seeing a shift towards automation. Recently, workers
at an Amazon “fulfillment centre” unionized to protect their
jobsand just in time too. Otherwise, what was to stop
Amazon from replacing its human workers with automation?
The answer: not much. Fortune magazine estimates that
“[artificially intelligent] robots will replace 40% of jobs in the
next 15 years.”[i] Any job today that does not require “soft
skills”the human qualities that a robot or artificial
intelligence cannot yet replicateis replaceable.
Unfortunately, most of the vocational programming at
Fanshawe leads to jobs that require few soft skills. Fanshawe
should move to academic curriculums only and do away with
vocational programming; otherwise, the College is just
scamming students.
To that point, students themselves should want to move away
from vocational programming. Future skills reserve a student’s
place in the future job market. The Royal Bank of Canada
published a report in 2018 that said “humans” will be wanted
in the “age of disruption.” That means that workers who lack
important future skills like “active listening, critical thinking,
reading comprehension, social perceptiveness,”[ii] in short,
the skills that are difficult to program into a machine, will be
out of a job. Fanshawe needs to eliminate vocationalcurriculums and begin offering, exclusively, courses and
programs that create humans, not workers.
Will there even be jobs in the future? Let’s speculate about
workers not yet born. Within this century, we should have the
ability to automate the industries that allow our species to
survive. For example, robotics can automate the entire food
industry. We can program machines and drones to plant,
grow, cultivate, and distribute food. We can do the same for
water. We can do the same for shelter. People couldif they
choosecompletely remove themselves from the job market
entirely. So, why not just go to college to educate yourself on
subjects of interest and prepare yourself for a life of leisure?
Fanshawe can and should expand its offerings in academic
subjects to help support students who understand that the
idea of needing a thirty-year career to survive will soon be an
outdated idea.
In short, the jobs of the future are the jobs of now; it is a
disservice to students to continue to train them for jobs that
no longer exist. Fanshawe should respect its students and
stop promising them that completing a diploma, certificate, or
degree in a job training program will lead to success.
[i] Reisinger, Don. “A.I. Expert Says Automation Could Replace
40% of Jobs in 15 Years.” Fortune. Fortune Media IP, 10 Jan
2019, https://fortune.com/2019/01/10/automation-replace-job
[ii] Royal Bank of Canada. “Humans Wanted: How Canadian
Youth Can Thrive in the Age of Disruption.” March 2018,
https://www.rbc.com/dms/enterprise/futurelaunch/_assets-
custom/pdf/RBC-Future-Skills-Report-FINAL-Singles.pd
