Highlights:
- Restaurant Automation (and Automation in general) is expected to reduce certain jobs in the coming years.
- As companies adopt robots on manufacturing floors, inrestaurants, hotels and catering kitchens, and on delivery routes, employees have a growing opportunity to join the ranks in helping to build and implement the new technologies.
- The sectors most likely to adopt robotics are electronics, energy tech, medicine, utilities, consumer goods, and kitchens according to the latest reports for the robotics industry.
Robotics companies helping to create new jobs:
There’s no denying automation will eliminate certain jobs in the coming years. As companies adopt robots on manufacturing floors, in restaurants, hotels and catering kitchens, and on delivery routes, employees have a growing opportunity to join the ranks in helping to build and implement the new technologies. Both humanoid and nonhumanoid robots are set to reduce employment in the years to come, as nearly equal amounts of companies say they’re expecting growth, employee displacement. The sectors most likely to adopt robotics are electronics, energy tech, medicine, utilities, consumer goods, and kitchens according to the latest reports for the robotics industry.
The effects may differ depending on the industry:
For example, studies found that 60% of companies operating in the production of consumer goods and the oil and gas industry project jobs will be lost due to automation. On the other hand, 60% of companies operating in information technology services expect jobs to be created due to robots in the next five years.
That said, a number of Robotics companies are looking for employees, as they aim to add a significant number of employees. Roles are open in numerous positions, from electrical and mechanical engineering and programming to IT, coding and security.
While a lot of startups are doing layoffs or sort of playing defense, the Robotics industry is big enough and exciting enough that the plan is really being very aggressive and quite promising over the coming years. The current delivery ecosystem is slow, expensive and not good for the environment. The opportunity to make it over with automation has benefits for customers, employees and the planet.
Technology is sometimes changing the nature of jobs, but it’s significantly increasing the productivity of any given employee. In the past, we were using an employee to do one delivery at a time driving a car one at a time to go and make deliveries. Currently, we’re training that employee to maintain and manage a fleet of robots, so that same employee can do fifty deliveries in an hour rather than five, and that enables us to pay that employee a lot more. These are jobs that employees really want.
The use of automation at companies large and small has two main advantages: It reduces challenges for employees in taking away monotonous or dangerous tasks in their day-to-day roles and tasks, and it keeps companies competitive and speedy in the production process. It can also help to solve an ongoing labor shortages.
From an employees’ standpoint, it’s another effective tool, a tool to help the employees become more effective and more productive in the job that they are currently doing, to make them better performers and more in demand, and hence they become more eligible to get the jobs for the future, which are often better, safer and higher-paying jobs.
Businesses have to strike a delicate balance between using automation to make employees’ lives easier without replacing them entirely. Unions and labor rights advocates have often fought the adoption of robotics, worrying that it could replace some human functions entirely.
China’s large-scale adoption of robotics is a clear evidence that automation has become more important for companies to maintain an edge in business. China is the largest user of robots in the world by far. That tells you that this tool is so important that even countries that have an abundance of labor and low-cost labor still need to automate in order to stay globally competitive. Automation has also started to take hold in the foodservice industry (Restaurants, Catering, Hotels, Etc.) as companies try to make the food industry more productive. On a robot that helps prep avocados for its guacamole, dubbed the Autocado. A burrito chain has also been testing out a chip-making robot, as it aims to free up employees to focus on other tasks in the kitchen and make their labor more effective.
While robots and automation may be solving labor pains for certain sectors, there’s a shortage of employees for the suppliers of the technology. Therefore, the workforce in the Robotics and Automation industries needs more training on how to use automation and build robots. As a country, we often have a mindset that the only way to get a great job is to go to college, get a four-year degree, a Master’s, or even a Ph.D., but that’s not totally true. There are many companies that are hiring people right out of high school because of this labor shortage in technical skills that they have. We have to address this –otherwise companies who adopt automation are challenged with the ability to do it because they don’t have a team of employees on their staff that knows how to deal with automation and operate these machines (robots).
