Mid-career middle-aged middle managers – watch out, the robots are coming

 The jobs are being taken over by new technology, especially AI, and there’s an oversupply of people fighting for whatever shrinking number of such jobs is left.

Earlier this month, an autonomous humanoid robot ran a half-marathon race in China and beat the human world record by over five minutes. Earlier versions of such robots didn’t even come close.

Robots have been around for decades. China has more of them than the rest of the world combined. But autonomous humanoid robots are different. They have a torso, a pair of arms and legs and what can pass for a head and eyes, and function without direct human control.

It’s difficult to make robots do what we do – climb stairs, open doors, cook and serve food, care for infants and elders etc. They need to be human-like because much of our world is designed for humans: our humanoid shapes and forms and physical limitations.

Advances in actuators and artificial intelligence are making them better and cheaper. One model is priced at the cost of employing two workers for two years.

Given such robots don’t take time off and can last 10 years, they’re very attractive especially where labour costs, availability and efficiency are major business challenges.

Where does that leave us Malaysians? Probably relatively safe at least for a while longer.

Fearing the future

The Malaysians who are actually being replaced by robots and technologies right now are another demographic group that hasn’t quite received enough attention. I call them the 3-Mids demographic.

The first Mid is those in their middle age, people in their 40s, who spent a couple of decades plodding through what used to be a predictable career path. Many are paying for their children’s education while also paying off mortgages and loans.

Most know they won’t get to the top of the corporate hierarchy, and are OK with it. While skilled at what they’re doing, age has made them more risk-averse: their skills aren’t very marketable or transferable or of much help when they lose their jobs, even with a generous severance package.

The second Mid is that of middle management: people who are a decade or two past entry-level, but not quite at the senior levels that make all the big decisions and earn the big bucks.

They’re the managers, team heads or supervisors who run small units or produce reports or otherwise act as the bridge between those at the top and those below who actually do the work.

When computers came in

Middle managers were heavily hit when businesses began computerising a few decades ago: rather than a bridge, they were seen as obstacles to be replaced by smarter and cheaper computers and systems.

Many lower-level employees such as the factory hands, clerical, counter and administration staff, those that form the so-called “overheads”, also lost their jobs when tasks and records were computerised and centralised.

At one of my previous jobs, a major regional branch with 60 staff was stripped to just four. Transactions and records and the entire business processes were computerised, centralised and later some were even shifted overseas.

Many middle managers there were either retrenched or relocated to centralised sites.

Customer services were consolidated into massive remote centres in cheaper locations. Sales jobs were passed on to third-party sales agencies. Companies drivers, security guards, janitorial staff and many other “unskilled” workers had their employment outsourced.

Even the company buildings were sold and leased back, turning them from being “unproductive” assets on the balance sheets into easily-manageable (and easily-eliminated) operational expenses.

Muddling through

The third Mid is that of those in mid-career, people who went to university, earned a degree or two, and got into a career everybody then thought would be steady and safe.

Now their jobs are being taken over by new technology, especially AI. Having “professional” qualifications is no longer a safe bet. Technology is doing their jobs better and faster and cheaper, and there’s an oversupply of people fighting for whatever shrinking number of such jobs that are left.

Sadly, many who are mid at anything also tend to be mid at everything.

A middle-management person also tends to be middle-aged, far away from EPF withdrawal age and children who have become independent. They also tend to be mid-career, with a lot invested in their career in a job market that no longer values those investments.

Neither here nor there

When it rains it pours. Increasingly, their skills are no longer in demand, and they are often overlooked because of negative perceptions about their age, energy, culture fit, ability to learn new skills or salary expectations.

My own generation of “baby boomers” went through our career lifecycle in a much different world. Jobs were precious, and we held on to them almost at all cost. But the economy was growing and creating jobs, and we didn’t have to go back to the kampung or the farm or the factories for dirty or dangerous or poorly paid work.

We had more fallback options, as bad as they were.

The current 3-Mids generations face a different, tougher world: they’re neither here nor there, stuck in the middle, sometimes in all three middles. Getting out of that spot is getting harder all the time. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.