Globalisation: Obsolete Jobs - Essay Example

Although Companies still claim that Human resources (HR) is their greatest asset as a matter of fact “skilled” HR could be perhaps the greatest asset and not only the human resource.

I have hundreds of examples to support my claim above, however, let me just give you a small but factual example that I had seen during the last decade. With the stunning invention of computer hardware/software, the world witnessed heavy downsizing in almost every industrial sector. Millions of people especially the unskilled workforce was deprived of their jobs as a result of neck-breaking inventions. As for how the technologies kept on getting upgraded and excelled, more and more jobs and the machines, which the world’s people were amazed on, became scrapped. Telex machine/Telex operator is the best-fit example to support my statement above. Telex machine, which was once perhaps deemed to be the fastest source of communications, no longer exists.

I understand the basis of jobs that became obsolete is “Necessity is the mother of invention” more than jobs themselves being “unpleasant”. Before the invention of email/internet, people were comfortable with the postal service and did not feel the postal service was unpleasant or inconvenient. However, now enjoying the facility of email/internet, we now feel embarrassing sending things by mail. I recall that in the olden days, the job of stenography was highly demanding and valuable, but today MS Word has most of the built-in features (spell-check, grammar, thesaurus, etc.), which have almost replaced the requirements of this job. So what I mean to say is that it is the innovation more than a job itself being unpleasant, that changes the style and ways of doing jobs making us feel bad doing jobs with an old method. It is exactly like a mobile phone Vs. landline phone. The world enjoyed communications facilities for hundreds of years using landline phones but today, we, having a mobile phone in hand, feel inconvenient using the landline phone.

Today, in this age of innovation and unabated advancing technologies, it is out of the question to compare human efficiency Vs. machines. It is a myth that machines have replaced human capabilities not only in terms of speed but also in terms of perfection/accuracy. ATM, Calculator, Computer software, Construction/engineering machinery, are very few examples that have made a large no. of jobs obsolete.

As there is an overwhelming consensus by the world’s researchers that “There is no hope of perfect research”, I foresee that the time is not away when most of the current technologies would go obsolete and the upcoming generation would soon be enjoying more hi-tech & sophisticated technologies.

Baldwin, R. (2006) starts, in his concluding remarks, with two assertions:

1. Globalization will continue and it will continue to create pressures to reallocate economic resources across sectors, firms, and occupations.
2. The direction and nature of the change are impossible to predict with any accuracy.”