In the seven years since I launched Crowdsourcing Week the Covid-19 pandemic is undoubtedly the biggest, and most awful global phenomenon. The pandemic lockdowns announced by most national governments meant the worldwide pool of available skilled labor grew virtually overnight, across all age groups. How has it affected you? Have your plans been put on hold, or do you see some opportunities opening up? Is it true that necessity is the mother of invention, and you are acquiring new workplace skills? Here is my look at some ways that crowdsourcing and crowd-based business models can support businesses and their stakeholders during the turmoil caused by this Covid pandemic.
Many futurists were already forecasting increasingly high levels of job losses due to the introduction of robotics and machine learning fuelled by artificial intelligence. Workers performing repetitive tasks are reckoned to be the hardest hit. The UK innovation foundation Nesta previously forecast that up to 30% of existing jobs were at risk anyway, and the process is likely to accelerate as businesses carry out their enforced reviews of how to continue trading. Though the new jobs that don’t yet exist are also perhaps nearer.
We’re not talking about just warehouse shelf stacking and item retrieval, unmanned lawnmowers, flipping burgers, and laying bricks on construction sites. Legal searches, translation and transcription services, call center staff, bank tellers — all are at risk. The work least affected by artificial intelligence is creative, collaborative, utilizing a wide range of skills, and is flexible. That’s where people should increasingly look for opportunities, and what education should prepare more people for, according to Catalina Schveninger, who at the time was the Head of HR at UK-based online education platform FutureLearn. In a recent article we also took a look at the fast growth of the Skillshare platform that provides video guides for improving creative skills.
You can continue this article at https://crowdsourcingweek.com/blog/how-crowdsourcing-can-tackle-mass-unemployment/ where it was first published.
