workforce generally, I think there will be many opportunities for increased use of technology.
While we’ ve seen health and aged-care expenditure grow rapidly in recent years, it clearly can’ t continue growing at that rate. There’ s a need for greater productivity to kick in at some point, and there will be many exciting pieces of technology that will help that happen. That said, what we also see is that the people skills, interpersonal skills and caring skills are the ones increasingly in demand. Technology is automating much of the more routine stuff. What it doesn’ t do well is the interpersonal stuff.
That’ s where human workers have the comparative advantage. It will be an area of jobs growth, but people in the sector will need to start using technology more than many of them are at the moment. Perhaps technology can take out many of the more routine aspects of their work and leave them to focus on the higher value-add services, the interpersonal [ touches ] that involve caring for people, rather than the more routine tasks.
One of the large trends highlighted in the report related to the explosion in device connectivity and rapid advances in automated systems and artificial intelligence towards 2035. What impact will this trend have on aged-care workers and their education? Technologies are changing more rapidly than ever and that’ s likely to continue. All workers are probably going to need ongoing education and training, so the paradigm of finishing school and going to TAFE or university or whatever and picking up some skills that you then use for the rest of your career – as much as it ever existed – is now passing.
Workers will need to update their skills continually as new technologies and working practices become important, and also as industries change. We see the economy is itself changing faster than ever. We see some major shifts between sectors so, again, that ongoing education will probably be important. The STEM skills are useful. They’ re important.
There will be many opportunities to add value, to make ourselves useful, if we can simply use technology to work with people on making their lives better. I would imagine aged-care workers, like many other workers in the future, would be using tablets or smartphones or whatever the next generation of devices are, and will be permanently in touch with one of these. This will provide people with information at their fingertips. For example, all the relevant data about the patient they’ re talking to. Another example might be automating a lot more of the monitoring work.
There’ s great potential. For example, we had a smart-home project in the CSIRO that was looking at using some of these connective devices and sensors for automated monitoring of vulnerable older people in their homes. That could take much of the more routine and mundane stuff away from the aged-care workers but provide them with more information than they’ ve ever had, and with a greater opportunity to help their patients.
Another implication set out was that attitudes and perceptions will change and technology-enabled jobs may allow workers to cross industry boundaries with greater ease; for example, men working in manufacturing industries might move into caring professions. What opportunities and challenges might this involve? There are certainly some great opportunities there. In Australia, we’ ve seen a steady decline in manufacturing and that’ s likely to continue. [ That sector ] still remains a large employer, it’ s still important to the economy and is likely to continue to be so, but we’ re certainly seeing a steady trickle of people essentially being displaced from the industry as factories close down. That will probably continue and that means many of these workers are going to need to look for jobs elsewhere. Aged care is probably the fastest-growing occupation in Australia in recent years, and that also will probably continue.
There are big opportunities there, particularly since aged care is so distributed around the country, unlike some of the well-known big factories or mines. There are older people pretty much wherever there are people. However, it may be challenging for some individuals to learn the skills in aged care that are in strong and growing demand all over Australia.
[ Manufacturing and aged care require ] different skill sets. They have different cultures. Attitudes will be required to shift, particularly perhaps for men, for some of them to move into less traditional roles such as caring for the aged. That’ s increasingly where the opportunities are, going forward, so it’ s necessary for people to do that. There may be attitudes or cultural barriers to change; that’ s something that we need to overcome as a society.
The federal government, I believe, has a scheme looking to help people make the transition specifically from manufacturing into aged care, so efforts are underway in this space and long may that continue. n
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