One third of Spanish workers believe automation is putting their job on the line

A recent study from IPSOS and the World Economic Forum unveils new insights to the Spanish workforce: 33% of workers believe that automation is putting their current jobs in jeopardy.

The rapid speed in which technological progress occurs inevitably generates concerns - one of them is employment. Once the automation technologies are smart enough, will they end up replacing workers, and at what cost?

At a global level, this fear is at 30%, and it is in the large emerging countries - India, 49%, Saudi Arabia, 43%, China, 42%, Brazil, 39%, Mexico, 39%, and in France, 37%, where concern that automation endangers current employment is greater, in contrast to countries like Sweden, 14%, Japan, 15%, Germany, 18%, and Russia, 19%, where said worry is less.

The professionals most concerned about the consequences of automation are in the agricultural sector (38%), in the administrative sector (37%) and, to a lesser extent, in the health and social services sector (23%). On the other hand, automation is more frequent and expected in the media, telecommunications and data processing sector (55%) and finance (54%).

Completely different work in ten years

Automation is a reality that is already changing the way companies and workers are linked to employment. In Spain, 43% believe that automation will make their work completely different in the next ten years.

If the results obtained in Europe are compared, the impact of long-term automation does not affect all countries equally; while 44% of respondents from Italy and Belgium believe that their roles within the workplace will change in the future, in countries such as Sweden (29%) and Germany (32%) believe that automation will have a smaller impact on their job.

Automation, one of the major players in this last decade

Almost half of the professionals worldwide (46%) say that automation has done its job completely different from what it was ten years ago, and tend to value positively the changes that automation brought with the processes of their jobs.

However, in Spain, despite the fact that 41% of professionals - five percentage points below the average - believe that automation has changed the way they work , the assessment of this technology as an improvement in certain aspects of work is finds below the global average.

Specifically, only 38% of Spaniards (49% worldwide) say that automation has made their work easier , 30% (46% globally) considers that automation has improved the quality of their work, the 26% (42% worldwide) believe that it has reduced the risks of injuries during work and only 24% (40% worldwide average) indicates that it has made their work more interesting.

Preparing workers to deal with automation

Industries, like professionals, are constantly adapting to keep up with the demands of the market. In Spain, 53% of respondents said that their company offers training to acquire skills on new technologies or solutions that your organization is using, and 56% training to improve or update their technical skills. In both cases, internal training is offered twice as often as external training.

However, the disparities between countries are considerable. In terms of technical skills, where the global average stands at 64%, more than four out of five workers in India (91%), China (86%) and Peru (84%) indicate that they are offered training to improve or update their technical skills, compared to less than half in Japan (28%), Russia (42%) and France (49%).

With respect to the training offered on new technologies or solutions that your organization is using, there are also large gaps per country. Japan (24%), Russia (36%), France (42%) and Hungary (47%) receive the least training of this type, well below the world average, which reaches 61%.

On the other hand, access to internal training is more widespread in India (59%), Peru (55%) and Canada (55%) while access to external training is more common in China (37%), Saudi Saudi (36%), India (31%) and Brazil (28%).

For economic activities, the sectors where more training is offered are finance and real estate, scientific and technical services and, finally, professionals in the media, data processing and telecommunications - conversely, where less training is offered, they are transport, logistics and wholesale and retail trade.

Join us in Miami Beach, June 5-7 for the Global Online Marketplaces Summit.