The future of employment post Covid

In a country which needed to grow at eight to ten per cent for a sustained period of two decades and more to move two hundred million out of poverty, we have seen the exact opposite outcome and need to correct it soon

It may be strange to talk about post-Covid scenarios at a time when most of India is struggling to cope with the enormous second wave of Covid-19 that is hitting rural India as hard as it first battered urban locations across the country. But a less talked about phenomenon is the Azim Premji University study released recently that suggests over 200 million of our countrymen have been pushed below the poverty line by the ongoing pandemic. In a country which needed to grow at eight to ten per cent for a sustained period of two decades and more to move two hundred million out of poverty, we have seen the exact opposite outcome and need to correct it soon.

The sad part is that livelihoods have been affected across the board-in the salaried urban sector as well as in the non-formal rural jobs. And this decline in opportunities had started well before the Covid-19 virus hit the country. The Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) has traced the growth of salaried jobs for a four year period from 2016-17 to 2019-20, with the figures inching up from 21.2 to 21.6 to 21.9 per cent during the period when India was clocking a real Gross Value Added rate of six to eight per cent, showing the jobless growth phenomenon among large corporations, including the technology sector. The real brakes were applied, however in 2019-20 when salaried employment fell to 21.3 per cent.

Some would argue that entrepreneurship, spurred by slogans like “Stand Up India Startup India” would have compensated for the depressed employment figures and it is true that by 2019-20 India could boast of over 7.8 crore entrepreneurs, but this has had very little impact on incremental employment, possible because the majority of new entrepreneurship has been tech-intensive or single employee entities. Rural jobs, in agriculture and local entrepreneurship have been declining as well, which begs the question “where will the jobs of the future come from?”

This is no small problem because expectations will soar once Covid-19 show signs of really receding and India will need to put those two hundred million to work without losing any people already employed. The challenge that artificial intelligence and automation pose to the already employed should not be minimised and every employee and a young person entering the workforce in future should be encouraged to embark on a process of continuous learning. As Yuval Noah Harari says, one should fully expect that the education and skills one has got will be obsoleted every ten to fifteen years and skills have to be refreshed and new ones learnt lifelong. Even in our Skills Lighthouses in Pune, Mumbai and Delhi, we are putting in AI-enabled skills platforms like Skills Alpha that will stay with the youth beyond their placement at the end of their course and continually give them opportunities to stay abreast of current and future knowledge needed in their chosen field. And if this can be done in the social sector, it surely must be done in all colleges and universities seeking to prepare youth for the future challenges of the world.

What we need to understand also is the future of jobs in the country. The Covid-19 interruptions have opened our eyes to three realities-the ability and willingness of people to work from home, the crying need to decongest urban spaces and distribute jobs around the country and the types of jobs that will emerge in the future. Each of these epiphanies that were born out of adversity present a lens through which to view the future of work and jobs.

Consider the famous “Work from Home” that most office goers have got used to, much to the chagrin of their bosses, their homemaker spouses and children studying at home whose workspaces have been rudely intruded into. Future homes will have to be enlarged while offices shrink to enable soundproof and private home offices for many. Gig working and sadly people enjoying two employments with or without the first employer’s permission are going to be the norm and employers will have to pay for outcomes or at least output and not just for showing up at work. Multiple small offices for the occasional meetings and associate get-togethers will spring up in five hundred or more small towns and it will become almost irrelevant which city or which country your colleague is signing in from. This is a welcome outcome though it will call for a minimum availability and reliability of communication networks and band width in all these locations.

And what will the jobs of the future look like? The enablers of these new work environments will themselves create more research, and audio visual jobs (Eric, Zoom CEO are you listening?) and a completely new genre of jobs-in design, in new era financial services, in Ed Tech and artificial intelligence applications will replace traditional repetitive office jobs. And manufacturing and healthcare will have to rely less on extreme automation and look for large workforce jobs when the new vision for India unfolds-into this happy land of eight hundred million Indians gainfully employed, let our country awake.