Employment in the information age

Employment in the information age

The information age can changed he entire employment sector around the world. In a daily office now days, people will have separate desks fitted with a landline phone, and a personal computer probably linked to the company database as well as the basic text editing software like Microsoft Word and some basic keyboard skills to be able to type on a computer keyboard. However in the early 1970’s offices, people have some of these things, like a personal computer, and instead had to use a type writer as well as having big filing cabinets full of paper work that is now-days all stored on the company’s server.

Installation of Computers in offices

The first ever computer programs were office work programs that offered basic typing and text editing capabilities as well as spreadsheet programs for office work. Many work innovations have been driven off office work. The technology of computers and programs like these have widely expanded to offices across the world at an immense rate as that have been proven to be much more convenient than the old methods of office work that included typing machines and a lot of paper work.  The integration of computers in office has started the seeming never ending decline of paper used at offices.

Expansion of computers across jobs

These days of the information age, it’s quite hard to think of jobs that do not require the functionality of computers. Most places that you go now use a computer, like the gas station or the local shops. This expansion came much slower compared to offices, computers first started expanding with very big supermarkets as they had the most money to invest into computers which were very expensive at that time then it started to expand to smaller shops like the news agents and small local shops. However, not all places across the world incorporate these kinds of methods, and still use the old methods of communication and dealing with money in third world countries like India or Pakistan.

Today, some jobs that you might not have even imagined use IT like the postman where they use a little hand held computer for you to sign for you package and for them to keep track of all their deliveries.

Computers and their effect on the industry

When every there is any new technological invention, can have a negative effect on the industry. For example, employers are slowly replacing real people with computers designed in their specific roles as computers are more efficient, but also the fact that they don’t have to pay computers for employment.

In the car industry, there has been a loss of jobs due to the expansion of robotics, because of wages and efficiency.  There has especially been a decline of jobs in the skilled industry that can be replaced by machines like sowing, where machines are doing the sowing now much more faster and accurately than people could. In the design industry there has also been a decline in jobs as companies used to hire people that has do drawings of prototypes of products and they used to have very big wages, however now all companies have to do is teach a person how to use a program to design these things on.

The usefulness of computers in the information age

There have been a lot of positive points to the expansion of computers and robots in employment however. Using computers and the internet meant that people are able to work together over long distances and do not have to be in the same room to work on a project, as well as the option to work from home on computers and then submit the work back to your employer thro
ugh email.

Computers are also able to monitor things in very dangerous environments like under water, volcanoes or space which means that computers can remove the risk from people doing work and hurting them selves.

Some computers that are used today that make some jobs amazingly more easier, but won’t take peoples jobs like parcel deliveries, where they use satnavs that tell the drivers exactly how to get from one point to another and do now have to worry with physical maps which can be confusing to read. However in the future, there might be a chance for the invention of fully functional cars controlled by computers, which will have an effect of the employment of drivers in the future.

Some of the disadvantages of the use of IT in jobs is that it resulted in people having low tolerance scale, as computers can do things to a very accurate scale unlike humans. Before computers people were used to having things not be perfect as that’s just how humans are, but after the use of computers, people make sure that almost everything is within the 1mm accuracy. It is also a negative effect on society knowing that computers are taking jobs that people should be doing, however there are more jobs being created because of the expansion of computers like computer programmers that have become necessary for the use of computers, there have also been expansions in the entertainment market with game consoles as well as virtual reality for companies like oculus that are always hiring in multiple offices across the world for new developers to expand this new technology.

Some jobs were not able to be done
in the past, but are available now because of computers. Companies like Amazon run on computers, where people are able to order things online one day, and literally receive them the very next day which would have been impossible without the use of computers.

I personally find the expansion of computers on jobs to be very interesting and beneficial to businesses to make them work more efficiently. I come in contact with things like these almost every day in places like shops, where they are replacing cashiers with self checkout lanes where you are able to scan the items yourself and pay for them which I have found to be much more efficient for me. I also believe that with the expansion of computers in jobs, means an increase of new technological inventions like the recent growth in the virtual reality market and the sale of the oculus rift which can not only be used for entertainment, but has also been taken by major organisations like NASA to be used for astronaut training or surgeons.