Jasmine Birtles
Your money-making expert. Financial journalist, TV and radio personality.
Have you noticed just how much you can do with your phone now? They’re little computers in your hands. With a touch of a few keys you can access the world’s knowledge on the bus, in a train or when you’re out having lunch.
You used to have to ring someone for information, go to the library, write to an organisation a long way away and look up articles in old newspapers to get this sort of information. Now it’s all done for you by a cute little gizmo in your hand.
That’s just your phone….
There’s a whole world of technology out there now taking over all sorts of other activities for us – robots, tiny computer chips, ever-cleverer laptops and phones are doing more and more. Now they even have a robot that can ‘taste’ food for us.
What next?
The machines are taking over.
It used to be that setting up a business needed a few people in a team. Now it’s one person and a laptop.
They can bring in freelancers – both from the UK and abroad – but where thy used to have staff, now a lot of businesspeople just use technology.
So, it’s not just the unskilled, factory jobs that are going – or have gone – it’s the skilled work that is getting scarcer
The number one thing to do is to get more training and keep learning, whatever age you are. This makes you much more employable and will bring in a better money
According to a recent item in the Economist, we are all going to have to work for longer to keep ourselves going and to cut the State’s social care costs.
It says “In Britain the proportion of men aged over 65 in employment has risen from less than 8% at the turn of the century to more than 13% today (for women, the increase has been from just over 3% to more than 7%). … At the turn of the century, 54% of British women aged 50-64 were in work; now it is nearly 66% (for men, the rise has been from 72% to 78% over the same period).”
The longer we work – or have to work – the more chance there is for technology (and globalisation) to take away the work that we’re used to doing. We have to adapt, and that’s where the learning comes in.
It might sound like a terrible effort to make ‘at your stage of life’ but as we know, the more we keep learning, the healthier and mentally stronger we are. Being forced to learn, to retrain or to just keep up with improvements and changes in technology is no bad thing. It’s like they say about crosswords – the more of those you do, the more alert you will stay.
It keeps you employable, helps you set up your own side business and stops you stagnating mentally so it can’t be bad!