Employment trends Post-COVID-19

Every Recession has presented numerous challenges for every country, making it difficult for industries to survive and strive, but they have also ushered an era of opportunities for new-age industries to sprout and shape consumer behaviour for decades.

The global recession, induced by COVID-19, will fundamentally change the way humanity works, and socialises, for years to come. The COVID-19 crisis will be a catalyst to unprecedented changes in every industry. Every industry will be forced to reform and restructure in order to transform into the new realities that will emerge.

The following three factors will lead the transformation of every industry:

1. Agility: (Planning and Execution)
2. Digital Transformation: (Products and Services)
3. Work from Home Culture: (People and Process)

1. Agility:

Agility will be the single biggest reason why some organizations will tide over this crisis. Agile organizations will use early insights, realign policies and processes, and train their organization workforce to focus on customer challenges.

Agility will be about making quick changes by the organization leadership, and communicating the same decisively to the organization, partner ecosystems, and customers. It will be built on insightful planning that sets the playbook of a new execution template that did not exist earlier. This would further bring efficiency and optimization to proactively seize the emerging opportunities, and create meaningful impact for society to prosper.

2. Digital:

Digital transformation should be aimed at creating holistic capabilities to leverage the possibilities and opportunities that new digital age technology presents. This will enable to serve the customers better and evolve the business. It will not be about technology adoption, but about evolution of business models, including products, processes and services.

It will be about exploring the canvass of opportunities presented by cloud, big data, analytics, AI, IOT, and other emerging realities that are shaping a new wave of customer behaviour. The end goals of business continuity and profitability, stakeholder’s value and customer satisfaction will drive this transformation.

3. Work from Home Culture:

The "Work from Home" Culture will play a defining role, has the potential to "STOP" this crisis, and is an industry worth trillions of dollars. In many cases, it’s priceless. To elaborate:

(S) Social Distancing: At the heart of work from home is social distancing, laying the foundational, preventive, cure for every country to limit the exposure and spread of this deadly pandemic. This alone can save the spread of the virus and help keep a check on the health of every individual, organization and the world economy.

(T) Travel Time: On an average, every working person travels for about two hours from home to work, and back. Working from home can save every employee over 600 hours of travel time, in a year, translating to 25 days of travel saving money, energy and time.

(O) Occupancy: Every company, big or small can potentially save 50 percent and above of office occupancy rental/leased space cost by allowing a sizeable chunk of support functions, and back-end operations, to work from home.

(P) Pollution: Apart from being a leading source of Green House emissions, daily commuting through road and rail transportation is responsible for over 30 percent of particulate emissions, killing millions of people every year due to respiratory illnesses, and wasting billions of dollars in healthcare.

While every industry must and will find ways to transform, the following industries and sectors are well-poised to leverage opportunities, faster than the others, to create larger employment opportunities.

Digital Payments

Increased use of smartphones and higher internet penetration will propel this market to growth percentage in strong double-digits. Governments across the globe will continue to take initiatives to promote digital payments. India is set to create many employment opportunities through ‘Digital India’ initiatives. Every merchant will move towards digital payment adoption, growing the POS (Point of Sale) and mobile payment technology platforms.

Cloud Computing

Cloud will become the bedrock for every organization in the future. The post COVID-19-phase will witness exponential growth in cloud computing as it is affordable, easy to use and highly customized to requirements of scalability. Every industry is likely to move a larger workload of their enterprise applications to cloud. Cloud will simplify the monitoring of resource consumption, and every service delivery will capitalize on this opportunity. Cloud will also move beyond foundational infrastructure to cover every facet of the organization process, including sales and marketing.

Content

All major networks and studios will launch their ‘direct-to-consumer’ streaming services, and content libraries, to attract customers who will grow hungry for consumption. Content will cover the entire scope of video, music and gaming, and, with 5G support, this industry will witness stratospheric growth. Subscription services will become more promising with the possibilities of having customized and targeted advertising options, and ad-free content.

Healthcare

Healthcare comprising of hospitals, medical equipment, diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, medical tourism and telemedicine is poised for tremendous growth. This sector will certainly benefit a lot from schemes like PMJAY, and other health care expenditures, by the government. Digital health will impact the entire value chain – from testing, medicines, and health cards, to telemedicine. Many disruptions being marred by medico-legal concerns, doctors’ accessibility, data base and licensing concerns, will be resolved to create a "24-Hour medical assistance available" country.

Cyber Security

This will be at the centre of the new era as every industry will adopt digital transformation. The development of safe, and secure payment gateways, and security walls will drive this market growth. It will involve the use of blockchain, application program interface (API), and other advancements to arrest the occurrence of cybercrimes and financial fraud.

Ecommerce

The future of e-commerce will be exciting: a lot of new categories will join the basket of ecommerce, making every product, or service, available online. The growth will be higher in emerging economies with the rise of internet penetration and data speeds. It is undeniable that post-COVID-19, the ecommerce growth rate will outpace earlier levels. Ecommerce will expand from B2C, to B2B, for companies to buy products and services for their workforce.

Online Education

Education will dramatically be affected post COVID-19 as it will embrace the digital world in the fastest, and largest scale. Educational Institutions will come of age, and traditional teaching standards will become a thing of the past. The impact will be seen from pre-school to higher education, offering flexibility of learning to students, and flexibility of teaching to teachers. The cost of education will become cheaper and accessible to a larger section of the society.

Insurance

This industry will become relevant and important as the society will become more conscious about health, natural calamities, epidemics, and need for social security. Insurance companies will be seen as service providers, as opposed to entities that issue insurance policies. Individuals will realize the societal value, and importance, of insurance against unexpected events for heath, bankruptcy, retirement, and overall protection for their homes and families. Post COVID-19, it will have utility value.

Logistics

Most Industries and companies are built around delivery models, and post COIVD-19 uncertainties will bring a larger demand for this industry as the dimensions of distribution will expand. Increased efforts to promote self-sufficiency will lead to expansion between regions and territories. Hyper-Local expansion with a stronger emergence of e-commerce players across multiple categories will play a pivotal role. The future of logistics will be paved with high technology adoption and transportation additions would reduce cost, time and waste.

Robotics

Robotics will move at a very fast pace, and industries will benefit from its application in fields which are currently considered non-practical. Progressive industries and organizations will test and validate the implementation of robotics for public and personal uses. This will result in the expansion at a large-scale level – from security with the usage of drones, to manufacturing plants for precision activities, and in medical science for risk aversion.

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The above industries will embrace agility, digital, and a work-from-home culture, which would pro-actively make our lives easier, and businesses more profitable. These are the industries and sectors which will continuously hire for talent and become one of the largest sources of employment generation.