A robot can do that: Job listing for simple labor drops 30 percent in Japan

Jul 19, 2020 | News On Japan

Jul 19, 2020 (Nikkei) - For a country that is facing a major labor shortage, Japan has been slow in the digitalization of the workplace.

In manufacturing, for instance, skills have been passed on from generation to generation, from maestro to protege, forming the backbone of "Made in Japan."

But data shows that the employment landscape in Japan is changing.

The need for social distancing has pushed companies to take automation seriously, and a third of jobs that could be easily automated have been wiped away.

Nikkei examined job opportunities in May and June on the website of recruitment agent Persol Career. Using criteria laid out by Oxford University, the 2,200 types of jobs on offer were divided into two categories: those that can be easily automated, of which there were about 250 types; and those that cannot.

For jobs that could be easily automated, there was a more than 30% year-on-year decline in availability, while jobs that were not easily automated declined by just 10%.

Easily automated jobs include desk clerks, which had dropped more than 35% compared with the same months a year earlier, and manufacturing sector jobs which decreased by more than 30%.

The change seems to indicate that many companies are implementing automation technologies in their offices and factories. As the coronavirus pandemic induces people to socially distance from each other, the trend is accelerating.

Automation is supported by technologies such as AI and robotic process automation, or RPA. The prefectural office of Ibaraki, located northeast of Tokyo, used RPA in recent months to process the paperwork for paying cash handouts to local companies affected economically by the pandemic. Many staff could not come in to work, but using RPA allowed the office to cut down 1,800 hours of tasks that were previously done by humans.

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