"Robotization, automation and employment: new demands and qualifications" was the central theme of the conference that brought together national and international experts this Thursday as part of the second edition of Industry Week.
The poor results shown by secondary education was the line that guided the participation of the director of Economic Studies of the Chamber of Industries (CIU), Sebastián Pérez. "I have the feeling that we have a patient who has a serious heart problem and we are talking about issues that are incidental to the health of the human being that we have to take care of," said Perez.
According to him, "there is an emergency" in the area of adolescent education that is "a serious problem" because young people are leaving the educational world. "The high school curriculum is very backward with respect to what the world and its demands are today," he warned.
"The first problem we have is that we have a hard time identifying it. Half of the kids don't finish high school. (…). Finishing high school under the current model doesn't pay and that's why they don't finish. We have to start demanding our politicians to please take the issue as an emergency. If we don't act now the social differences and wage gaps are going to be much worse," he said.
For his part, the representative of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Fernando Vargas said that robotization and automation is installed "like a virus" throughout the continent. "Everyone is talking about the end of work and that the world is going to give us a series of surprises".
Vargas considered that the region as a whole has a deficit of human resources to face the challenge of diversifying the productive matrix by adding knowledge in more sophisticated goods, by adding value to traditional products or generating new goods.
Poorer education
"We have better education, but with less quality. We have a skills gap. More than four out of 10 employers say they have trouble finding workers with the right skills for new jobs," Vargas said. He also noted that the performance of young women in the PISA tests "leaves much to be desired" in math, science and reading.
For Manuel Albaladejo of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), there are two visions. The optimistic one that says that any industrial revolution has been followed by the generation of employment at all levels and the pessimistic one that argues that technological changes and the speed with which these modifications are taking place are possibly causing that "many of the jobs that are being lost are not being generated again".
"We think we don't have jobs. There are 3.5 million job openings worldwide in manufacturing sectors, primarily systems engineering, electronics, software and simulation. The demand is fantastic. The impact of robotization is going to be less with the ability of countries to move into those sectors that are going to be much more dynamic," he predicted.
In addition, the expert stressed that "possibly" the future will be more oriented to how to start generating entrepreneurs who have the flexibility and autonomy to work, regardless of whether someone puts an employment contract on the table.
Meanwhile, Sebastián Rovira from Cepal commented that it is necessary to generate spaces for training to be inserted in the labor market and at the same time not to forget the importance that science and applied research will have more and more.
"Thinking about what is going to come, we have to be more sophisticated and see how much training is being done in robotics, artificial intelligence and big data, which is something that will be in demand. These are things that we have to discuss today," Rovira concluded.
Source: The Observer
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