Is your IT team ready for the robots - Viewpoint - careers advice blog Viewpoint careers advice blog

Is your IT team ready for the robots - Viewpoint - careers advice blog It seems that artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are moving at lightning speed from the laboratory and are touching every single part of our lives â€" the way we read the news and hail a taxi has changed, and soon the way we work, and the skills needed to do our jobs will evolve. As the World Economic Forum puts it, we’re on the brink of a Fourth Industrial Revolution â€" and the technology that underpins it will have a huge, and some would say, unpredictable impact on business. As Andrew McAfee, explains in this Economist podcast, there is no clear distinction of the level of automation and indeed transformation of jobs. However, one thing is for sure â€" with digitalisation and automation such a high priority, the impact on the role of the CIO and their IT departments the world over will be profound. A changing workplace It’s been fascinating to see how  a step change in technological developments has enabled what was recently considered science fiction to become a reality. Across all industries, from warehouses to fruit picking, healthcare to fast-food preparation, those areas of employment that haven’t traditionally been automated are now experiencing a rise in robot involvement. Countless other developments are taking place that, though less eye-catching, I believe are no less remarkable. China’s robot revolution is filling the country’s factories with manufacturing robots. In Rwanda, the worlds first regular commercial drone delivery service is up and running, with drones dropping medical supplies at designated delivery points. UK Prime Minister Theresa May recently promised an extra £2bn a year to be spent on RD by 2020, and many innovative companies, such as BAE Systems, are already opening their own dedicated training centres. The automotive industry is busy implementing a whole host of new innovations, from internet-connected vehicles, driverless cars and autonomous lorries designed to make door-to-door driverless deliveries. We will always need people to design, program and repair robots Whilst as I said earlier, it’s hard to predict the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, what we know for sure is that each and every one of these remarkable technological developments will have required a huge support from the company’s CIO and respective IT teams to make them a success in their own right. After all, it’s hard to deny that even the most sophisticated robot is a simple and expensive pile of parts without a legion of highly skilled humans to design, program and repair it. As Melonee Wise, CEO of robot manufacturer Fetch Robotics, said in a 2016 article: For every robot we put in the world, you have to have someone maintaining it  or servicing it or taking care of it. There will be new jobs [and] there will be new things that people have to do. Its whether these employees are trained appropriately to do these new jobs. This view is supported by a Deloitte report which confirmed that technology has created more jobs in the last 144 years than it has destroye d. And this, I believe will have a huge impact on all of our IT infrastructure and departments of the future. Increased demand for robot creators As such, the emergence of this new generation of workplace robots has already lead to an increase in demand for IT professionals, or ‘robot creators’ with particularly niche areas of expertise: Robot programmers understand how a robot perceives the world. They create tailored code to enable the machine to execute its tasks efficiently and effectively. As well as a relevant degree and extensive training, robot programmers require people skills to liaise with clients so they can customise each machine to perform its desired function Robotics engineers combine skills from a range of engineering disciplines in order to design, build and maintain complex robotic machines. They are typically qualified to degree level in either electrical, manufacturing, industrial, electronic or mechanical engineering. Senior engineers are educated to at least degree level, and those at the cutting edge are likely to have specialist postgraduate qualifications in cybernetics and systems science research. Machine learning engineers focus on enabling computer technology to acquire intelligence in addition to that contained within its programming. Requiring skills beyond traditional computer science and programming, machine learning engineers need a solid understanding of probability and statistics as well as data modelling and evaluation. A multitude of technicians provide support and specialist expertise typically gained through hands-on apprenticeship schemes and classroom instruction. Evolving jobs, skills and training initiatives â€" is your IT talent pipeline fit for purpose? Whilst, these so-called ‘robot creators’ are just one area in which we are seeing an evolution in roles, skills and subsequent training initiatives, there will no doubt be many more. In fact, the World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs report predicts that automation could lead to the creation of 2.1 million new jobs, particularly in areas such as computing and engineering. And, as Tata Consultancy’s CTO states, Robotics and AI will transform many of the tasks that we do, especially in the IT world and the world of the CIO. Many things we did in the 60s are now done by software tools and are automated and are not relevant in todays world and this is now happening in the way we manage data centres, write software and test it. So, is your IT talent pipeline really fit for purpose? The strength and skill of your future IT team will have a huge bearing on whether or not a successful robot revolution will take place in your business. After all, as Ian Cox writes in his book, ‘Disrupt IT â€" a new model for IT in the digital age’, ‘Just as technology changed the organisation, today the IT operation has to change to enable organisations to benefit from the technology change currently occurring.’ I therefore believe that it’s time for IT departments to stop being so reactive, and more proactive, whilst really driving the agenda for digital disruption forward within their own organisations. But, it’s important to realise that whilst automation is here to stay, it won’t happen overnight, so we still have time to prepare. Even so, we mustn’t rest on our laurels. These new technologies will demand different skills from our IT teams and create new jobs. Therefore, I urge you to seriously start planning for this future world in your talent plans, and really think about whether your IT function has the skills it may need in the future. Also, remember that a successful transition into this new world of work will be impossible if we neglect to up-skill our current IT teams. After all, they will be the ones required to fill these new roles, many of which have not even been created yet. Hopefully you found this blog interesting. Here are some related articles which you also might enjoy: Big Data 2.0 will be 2017s trend to watch is your business ready? QA with David Pardoe, Group Head of Data Science, Hays SQL or NoSQL data for Data Science? 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