Where IT Impacts

Where IT Impacts

I strongly believe that technology will not replace humans in the work force although it will change employment and the workplace. With that said, I strongly agree with David Autor and David Dorn’s content in their article “How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class.” They did a splendid job with observing the impacts of IT. 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/how-technology-wrecks-the-middle-class/?_r=0

They touched on how technology saves many companies from hiring labor; however, at the same time technology is displacing many labor workers. Although these advanced machines are adopted to increase production, they still need workers to handle them so our labor workers become operators. However, it doesn’t take a whole team on the assembly line to monitor one machine so not everyone gets the job as an operator.

Information technology replaces a lot of the manual processes and production processes like organizing, sorting, and retrieving which leaves us with the “non-routine” jobs. These non-routine jobs are usually saved for the higher level employees like the managers, professionals, and technical people. The authors remind us how these people are the people with higher levels of education needed to analyze the data computed from IT. The article states how only 40% of Americans enroll in a four-year college after high school and more than 30% of those students don’t even graduate with a degree.

Overall, IT is not replacing jobs but how jobs are being performed by workers. The highly educated workers are benefitting most from the technological advances. Some labor jobs such as truck drivers and cooks are not necessarily threatened by IT. It is really the middle class jobs that are having a hard time with the rise of IT.

The authors and I agree that the best way to respond to the impacts of IT is to continue our education. Nowadays employers don’t want to provide training but are looking for trained and knowledgeable workers.  Even if you don’t want an IT job, many, if not all, companies do work with some kind of IT system so it doesn’t hurt to prepare yourself. If you are still waiting for the best time to invest in building your IT foundation, don’t you think the time is now?