The Hindu, India: Senior Director at Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work Says Automation Will Create Challenging New Roles for the IT Workforce

“Over the next three years, information technology companies will enter a new phase,” writes Manish Bahl. “The IT mandate will now stretch beyond the familiar realm of satisfying customers and employees and collaborating with the business and reducing costs to sealing customer relationships, discovering new business value and enabling business agility and innovation, while also ensuring security.” Excerpts:

A recent global study involving 1,000 senior IT executives throws considerable light on this future which will impact the IT workforce considerably. According to the findings of the study, the IT workforce will change in three interconnected ways in the future.

In the coming decade, a lot of enterprise IT jobs — indeed, millions of jobs over time — will be automated, but not at a scale or pace that will create the social dislocation that some are predicting, and many more are fearing.

Job automation: Automation will free precious IT resources and enable them to focus on activities that require higher-order thinking. Many of the workers displaced thus, would be absorbed into other functions, or would be reskilled for new jobs that are yet to be created. Organizations that focus relentlessly on optimizing and applying human-centric skills — collaboration, analysis, communication and innovation, to name few — will have a competitive advantage, particularly in terms of attracting and retaining top talent.

Enhanced workforce: For the vast majority of IT jobs, the new machine will actually enhance and protect employment. This means the employment will remain, and these jobs will be delivered with greater output and/or quality. IT personnel will come to view the new machine as their trusted colleague.

New IT roles: New jobs will focus on IT mastery. IT decision makers believe that entirely new professions will be created, driving employment in fields we can’t currently envision. By one popular estimate, more than half of the children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.

Within the overall enterprise IT workforce, there will be significant job transition (often creating skills mismatches), and figuring out “what to do” within this churn will create winners and losers. No one can escape the gravitational pull of the new machine.

Workplace automation blended with human intelligence will be the future of work.”

Click here to read more.