Technology may be getting more sophisticated every day, and slowly cannibalising manual tasks and administration, but data shows it’s not a future of robot overlords we face, so much as technology-assisted work.
That’s good news.
Tech that cuts out admin and gives us powerful insights into our customers frees us up from the daily grind.
It allows us to use more of our innately human skills – like creativity, interpersonal skills, strategic-thinking and problem-solving.
Here’s how to be part of it.
SKILLS NO LONGER IN DEMAND
Let’s skip over the bit where we point out the futility of competing with technology to do tasks technology is better at, like paperwork and filing.
Clerical skills are no longer in demand, and probably never will be again.
60 PER CENT OF JOBS TO BE PARTIALLY AUTOMATED
According to the McKinsey Global Institute, 60 per cent of occupations globally have activities that can be partially automated.
That is, automated by more than 30 per cent.
As partial automation in the workplace establishes itself as the norm in 2020, skills demand is starting to shift.
Professionals across all industries are gravitating towards work that requires more complex, innately human skills like strategy, leadership and management, creativity and innovation, data literacy, and interpersonal skills.
That’s where you can focus your career path, too.
WHICH SKILLS DO YOU NEED IN THE FUTURE, EXACTLY?
According to Deloitte’s Technology and the Future of Work, the Australian real estate industry’s critical skill shortages in 2020 through to 2030 are predicted to be:
- customer service skills
- leadership
- digital literacy
- communication
- sales skills
- innovative thinking and strategy
- conflict resolution
If you’re looking for one thing to focus on in 2020, you could do worse than making a point of building out your resume with some of the skills from Deloitte’s list.
That’s the kind of investment that is likely to set you up not just for success this year, but also in 2021, 2022, 2023, and beyond.
LESS GROWTH, MORE COMPETITION
According to the Australian Government Job Outlook 2019, the real estate industry is predicted to have below average employment growth by 2023.
It’s tipped to be 5.9 per cent job growth compared to 7.1 per cent across all
industries.
Slower growth means fewer jobs to go around, meaning more competition.
That’s still an increase of nearly 13,000 people nationwide.
Given that technology that powers real estate businesses, such as Console Cloud, is getting monumentally smarter and more powerful every day, it’s safe to say that those new employees will unlikely be needed to do manual tasks.
They’re more likely going to be doing cognitive and strategic work like growing rent rolls, understanding and using customer intelligence, and building your agency’s customer experience.
SO LONG, PAPERWORK
The future isn’t so much paperless as it is paperwork-less.
So let me say this: you are never, ever, ever going to need to get better at finding (or filling in) forms, document control, or filing conventions.
This type of work is going the way of the floppy disk, car phone, iPod and dodo.
That should be good news to most of us, since paperwork and spreadsheets are painfully vulnerable to human error.
Even faithful Excel will hopefully soon die the good death it deserves as a management tool, and go back to doing what it was designed to do, which is mathematics and data crunching.
THERE IS ALREADY A SKILLS GAP, AND YOU CAN FILL IT
Being employable and in demand will soon mean having an arsenal of talents that were never really in the property professional’s scope of work before.
Yet conveniently, these kinds of skills are already in short supply in the Australian economy.
It’s a shortage you can stand to benefit from, if you’re so inclined.
