GLOBALIZATION

Jobs dry up for travel 

agents and IT workers

By Alanah Eriksen New Zealand Herald Business

5:30 AM Monday Aug 13, 2012

If you're a travel agent or an accountant, you could be facing "extinction" by 2017.

Car manufacturers, retail and IT workers may also need to start thinking about a new career path as consumers increasingly turn to the internet for services and employers outsource for cheaper labour.

The Balance Recruitment agency has compiled a list of the top five jobs they believe will disappear in the next five years.

Managing director Greg Pankhurst said overseas companies were becoming more trusted by local businesses.

"Many jobs will become obsolete due to technological advances, while others will simply move offshore to Asia," he said. "Offshoring is not a new phenomenon, but people are getting a lot better at it and higher-skilled jobs are starting to go offshore. It used to be the very basic roles.

"It is vital people understand these changes and attempt to reskill so they don't end up becoming superfluous."

Continues below  . . . 

Globalization has made reading 

for entertainment and knowledge

more affordable than ever before.

Ebooks, available worldwide as 
soon as they are uploaded, are only a 
fraction of the cost of printed books!

These great reads can be downloaded to any

e-reading device or PC and are available from Californian company, Smashwords

New Zealand has been benefiting over the past few years as Australian companies outsourced services to New Zealand because it was a 'significantly cheaper' place to do business. But 'a lot of the stigma' about outsourcing further afield had been broken, Mr Pankhurst said.

A computer programmer in India would earn about $8000 a year compared with between $70,000 and $75,000 in New Zealand, he said.

The internet had also diminished some industries significantly, Mr Pankhurst said. Initially, bookshops, travel agents, music and video stores were affected but now niche and high-end suppliers of goods such as sporting goods, computers and branded fashion items, were selling products online.

Economists were expecting New Zealanders to spend $3.2 billion on online purchases this year, with the figure jumping to $5.4 billion for 2016, he said.

Auckland Flight Centre travel agent Mike van Beekhuizen said he didn't fear for his job as people enjoyed the face-to-face experience of customer service.

"You're making holidays come true for families, people are saving for these big trips. You get an email from them when they come back or they come and visit you and they just tell you about their experiences," he said.

The jobs that will survive were those that required a human touch such as hospitality workers, tourism operators, tradesmen, logistics workers, aged and health care and government workers including politicians.

Peter’s Point of View

When the NZ Herald article predicted in 2012 that travel agents and accountants would disappear by 2017, they were clearly wrong. The Herald article was one of the most masterly written pieces of doom and gloom ever published. The predicted demise of travel agents and accountants is simply not happening.

 

The world in which slaves worked until they
died has been replaced by a world
with leisure time and activities for all

It is true that over time some occupations do disappear, but the evolution of business and employment is, in some ways, just like the evolution of nature; as one species becomes extinct many new species take its place. There is a popular saying that as one door closes another opens, but in reality it is often a case of many new doors opening.

Many people like to blame the internet for the so-called hard times that exist today. Let’s examine that.

At the start of the twentieth century, www could have meant wooden wagon wheel because the whole world was busy bemoaning the expected demise of the wooden wagon wheel maker. But the wooden wagon was inefficient, few individuals owned one, and often as not the wheels fell off between one town and the next. To add to the woes of wooden wagon owners, they needed to own a horse and have somewhere to graze it. If the wagon was needed to transport produce to a market, they needed a team of horses.

Nowadays people will tell you that motor vehicles, and their exhaust fumes, are destroying the world, but think where the world would be without motor vehicles. With today’s population the world would be literally knee-deep in horse manure.  

The evolution of business and employment has been going on for thousands of years and the invention of the wheel and the wagon has been a vital part of that evolution, but the development of motor vehicles has been crucial. Before the Industrial Revolution few people lived beyond the age of 40 and the main causes of death were starvation (chiefly from unemployment) war, plague, murder and suicide. 

Industries and occupations are lost when more efficient industries and occupations take their place and efficiency ultimately puts more spending power into more pockets. Granted, there can be pain during transition but in the end commercial and industrial progress means wealth for more people and that can be seen in the growing range of occupations, products and services available that are available and affordable today.

When the wooden wagon wheel disappeared cars, aircraft and telephones were rare. Only the exceptionally wealthy owned them. Radio, television, computers and music tapes and discs, play station and thousands of other products and services now available were yet to be launched. Launching those products and services was not just a simple matter of inventing them and selling millions. They would have been useless until the masses of people had the money to buy them.

Outsourcing is a dirty word to many but it has positive benefits. It helps reduce the cost of goods and services and bring them within the reach of more people.

India, with more poverty and unemployment than any other country in the world, benefits enormously from outsourcing and that is just part of the evolving economic globalization in which ultimately everyone wins. As India becomes more wealthy, there are spin-offs for the rest of the world. Indians are now travelling more than previously thereby creating jobs in travel and tourism. They are also able to import more products from the rest of the world. 

Everyone ultimately wins from globalization.