While job automation promises to deliver huge productivity gains for large businesses, many workers are justifiably threatened by robots potentially replacing them within the next 5-10 years. In fact, the number of industrial robots has been steadily growing by at least 14% each year, showing that this fear is not unfounded.

But how can you make sure that your job is well-protected even when automation transforms into a widespread trend? Is there even a way to make sure you’ll still be able to do your job within the next 20-30 years despite the recent advancements in robotics?

If any of the above questions have been on your mind recently, don’t worry. In this guide, we briefly outline five key methods for protecting yourself from job automation.

What Are the Jobs Facing the Highest Risk of Automation?

Many people expect that robots are going to swiftly replace industrial and manufacturing workers. While there’s some truth behind this sentiment, the reality is that automation primarily threatens jobs that are very different from manufacturing. Here are just some examples of jobs that could potentially be fully automated within the next several years.

  • Business accountants.
  • Credit analysts.
  • Financial officers.
  • Real estate brokers.
  • Investment specialists.

You might disagree on the grounds that all the above jobs require a lot of skills and knowledge and typically pay well. Nonetheless, big data analytics has been making giant strides lately and nearly every algorithm on the market is able to run accurate financial predictive analyses and autonomously gather data. If scientists figure out a way to create reliable and efficient robots that can replicate human decision-making based on big data, it’s very possible that the above jobs will be automatised within the next decade.

In contrast, here are some professions that are unlikely to be replaced this century.

  • Creative workers
  • All personnel specialising in human interaction such as sales workers.
  • Decision-makers including front-line managers and senior managers.
  • Health and safety workers.

Even if you’re currently not employed in any of the above professions, don’t worry. There’s still a lot you can do to make sure that automation remains a very distant worry.

Acquire Skills in Communications and Speaking

Communication remains one of the areas that is currently out of reach for robots. While sci-fi films consistently demonstrate sophisticated automatic creations that can mimic human thinking and speech patterns, the reality has so far failed to match this prediction.

The most prominent reason for this is that there’s still a lot we don’t know about language development and acquisition. While linguists gravitate toward the opinion that language is innate, there are no ready-made methods to make robots replicate how language is structured and used by humans. The same goes for machine translation and public speaking.

Justifiably, humans also prefer to interact with other humans instead of robots. If you have some skills in communications, you’re sure to be valuable to the job market for a pretty long time.

Make Your Career More Adaptive

Presently, industrial robots that can reliably replace human workers all have the same shortcoming, namely specialising in a very narrowly defined task. A robot simply cannot perform unexpected tasks or be creative when achieving workplace objectives.

However, you can. With the advent of bite-sized learning (e.g., online academies), there remain very few reasons not to add some creative skills to your resume. For example, you can take a leadership course to make sure you’re ready to be promoted to a managerial position. Similarly, you can branch out into blog writing services to demonstrate your grasp of creative written communications.

Become an Entrepreneur

Businesses embrace job automation for a very understandable reason. Robots offer similar productivity levels when compared to humans while posing very little shortcomings of having a fully human workforce. After all, robots can’t really have workplace conflicts or experience burnout.

If you want to avoid someone making decisions about your job, you can always make sure that the only person who can fire you is you. There’s high demand for entrepreneurs in nearly every industry ranging from manufacturing to creative arts. If you think you have sufficient knowledge, it might be time to start working for yourself instead of someone else.

Strictly speaking, becoming an entrepreneur would be changing jobs. However, you can still remain within the confines of your preferred industry and focus on doing what you love.

Learn Robotic Interfaces

If you can’t beat them, join them! Automation could be an unavoidable process, but this doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from it.

Learning how to properly use and communicate with robots could be absolutely invaluable for workers facing a high risk of automation. If you know how to support your robot colleagues and can extract maximum performance when working with algorithms and automated equipment, automation can actually benefit you by expanding your current job role and adding high-paying career advancement opportunities. Fortunately, many online academies offer bite-sized courses on robotic interfaces and human-computer interaction.

Make Yourself Irreplaceable

Businesses cherish employees who possess irreplaceable knowledge such as knowledge of unique innovations or knowledge of how to improve work processes. If you make sure that employee is you, automation could be a very insignificant threat regardless of your chosen industry.

Actually following this recommendation can, however, be difficult. Not all companies allow employees to pursue their own projects or contribute with innovative ideas. If you find yourself stuck at a really conservative workplace at a high risk of automation, it may be time to switch employers to offer your cool ideas and creative thinking to someone who would actually appreciate your skills and value.

While automation is seen by many as a sign of the apocalypse, there’s not much to fear if you keep up with developing your creative skills and regularly read about the latest developments in robotics. If you follow the above guide, automation can be a good thing, eliminating all routine from your current work and allowing you to focus on what really matters in your profession.

Author Bio

Catherine Smith is an online Marketing Manager at PhD Centre, specialising in PhD research paper help. She specialises in research, content and article writing on various topics, including Education, Marketing, and Technology.