The adoption of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) could create 11 percent more jobs, over and beyond business-as-usual (BAU) growth rates in the textile and garment manufacturing industry and 18 percent more jobs in the information technology–business process outsourcing (IT–BPO) industry in Punjab by 2025, says the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The Bank undertook the study Assessing Implications of Industry 4.0 on Jobs and Skills in High-Growth Industries in Central Asia, which seeks to capture the anticipated transformations in jobs, tasks, and skills, and to outline policy directions to prepare the workforce for future jobs, particularly in the post-COVID-19 world.
The report noted that the analysis shows that the adoption of 4IR technologies can bring about quality jobs for workers if strong policies to encourage firms to adopt 4IR and encourage worker reskilling are implemented. The adoption of 4IR could create 11 percent more jobs, over and beyond business-as-usual (BAU) growth rates in the textile and garment manufacturing industry; and 18 percent more jobs in the IT–BPO industry by 2025. For these gains to be realized, policies must be implemented to encourage firms to adopt 4IR technologies and build awareness of the digital tools available.
It further stated that workers in manual roles are expected to face a higher risk of displacement while job gains are expected in technical roles, with over 70 percent of textile and garment employers expecting the proportion of technical roles to increase by 2025. This suggests that existing frameworks for the recognition of prior learning would need to be strengthened. Job gains from 4IR will also largely benefit male workers due to low female workforce participation in the textile and garment manufacturing sector, as one-third of garment workers in Pakistan are female currently. Inclusive 4IR reskilling policies would need to be adopted to distribute the gains of 4IR more evenly.
Strong reskilling policies will be needed to realize these job gains and to support workers displaced by 4IR. To enable the adoption of 4IR technologies, employers expect that a larger proportion of the workforce in both industries will be concentrated in technical occupations by 2025.
There will be significant changes in the relative importance of various skill sets for workers in each industry as the distribution of occupations changes. Digital and/or information and communication technology skills will be increasingly valued by firms in the textile and garment manufacturing industry while creative thinking and design skills will be increasingly sought after by IT–BPO employers. Strong skills development policies are needed to help workers reskill, particularly those in occupations prone to displacement.
These policies are also needed to build a workforce able to support the adoption of 4IR technologies. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is poised to fundamentally change the future of work. 4IR can be described as the advent of “cyber-physical systems” involving entirely new capabilities for people and machines, wherein new technologies, such as IoT, AI, additive manufacturing, robotics, and Big Data analysis among others, become embedded within societies. 4IR is fundamentally different from past industrial revolutions in its potential implications for economies and the workforce.
Source: Pro Pakistani