Photo: Ginni Rometty / Credit: IBM.com
IBM chair, CEO, and president Ginni Rometty recently made a prediction on stage at CNBC’s At Work Talent & HR: Building the Workforce of the Future Conference in New York earlier this week. While on stage, Rometty pointed out that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is going to shape up one of the biggest opportunities and challenges at the same time. Artificial intelligence has been replacing jobs and creating new ones at the same time.
In a report by the World Economic Forum, the value of digital transformations in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is estimated to hit $100 trillion in the next ten years alone across all sectors and geographies.
“As a result, we face an imminent and profound transformation of the workforce over the next five to 10 years as analytics and artificial intelligence change job roles at companies in all industries,” said Rometty during a keynote address at the event via CNBC. “I expect AI to change 100 percent of jobs within the next five to 10 years.”
There is a silver lining though. Rometty said that a minority of jobs are expected to disappear, but the majority of roles that remain will require people to work with analytics and some form of artificial intelligence that requires skills training at a large scale.
“To get ready for this paradigm shift companies have to focus on three things: retraining, hiring workers that don’t necessarily have a four-year college degree and rethinking how their pool of recruits may fit new job roles,” added Rometty.
IBM is investing $1 billion in apprenticeship programs for training workers for “new collar” jobs. This is a term that Rometty coined for workers who have skills in technology but do not have a four-year college degree. These new college jobs include working at a call center, developing apps, or working as a technical analyst for the company after participating in the Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) program. This program takes six years and includes starting with high school and receiving an associate’s degree.
Plus IBM and the Consumer Technology Association partnered to launch the CTA Apprenticeship Coalition — which will create thousands of new apprenticeships in 20 states in January. This program provides frameworks for more than 15 apprenticeship roles in rapidly growing jobs including software engineering, data science, analytics, etc.
