Blue-collar coders

For many, computer code is like Latin and complex physics all in one—but technology boffins and futurists in Silicon Valley see things differently.

With new technology comes a need for skilled workers able to drive and operate the emerging high-tech hardware.

It’s a need that will draw today’s blue-collar workers to roles in tomorrow’s high-tech industries.

Social media as trend forecaster

The popularity of social media platforms—most recently brought to a head during Snapchat’s recent IPO—offers an inkling into a pattern that could mirror how future users adopt and adapt innovative high-tech for efficient and practical uses.

Already billions of dollars have been spent developing virtual reality, drones and robotics, with social media playing a key role in generating user interactivity with potential customers, even before the tech product hits the market.

Occulus, Tesla and DJI Drones all use social media to help create a buzz about their tech, but it’s not only the buzz they’re interested in; many tech companies are also looking at how their particular tech hardware can become as ubiquitous as mobile phones—the ultimate tech hardware.

Social media’s popularity is directly linked to its accessibility and usability. Everyone gets it, it’s universal. It’s interactive to such a degree that it’s accessed multiple times on a daily basis. It’s become hugely relevant in the framing of every single individual life on the planet. Accessibility is provided by mobile phone omnipotence and usability by clever design.

Similarly, creating well-designed hardware that invites interactivity is front of mind when it comes to plans to feasibly construct drones, virtual reality environments and robots for the future world. Be it for corporate executives or labourers on building sites—industries all across the board will likely prefer adaptable future technologies.

Technology infrastructure is the foundation of high-tech industry

Hopefully, back in Australia, the fractious partisan National Broadband Network (NBN) debate works itself out. It will be then our lawmakers can start to unpick what super-fast cyber-networks will mean for Australian industry across the board, including traditional blue-collar industries, like agriculture.

Think about highly skilled farm-workers living remotely on a working homestead, able to patch into meetings and intimate work-in-progress brainstorm sessions with counterparts across the country, as if in the same room, mulling over a particularly vexing problem.

With intricate 3D scanning technology and precise real-time high-resolution information transfer systems, a small town farm-worker in remote Australia could confidently affect the smooth operation of a complex product delivery process happening in Sydney or Melbourne, without having to physically be there.

It’s a very real depiction of a kind that’s excited creatives and futurists since R2D2 projected Princess Leia’s holographic message to Obi-Wan Kenobi in 1977, except conducted in flannel shirts and tattered Akubra hats.

Remote control planes have never been so cool

Since the year 2000, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), technology has been responsible for creating more than three million jobs in Australia, and this is predicted to grow a further eight per cent by 2020.

A recent study into Australian trends by the influential professional service employment agency, Morgan McKinley, suggested salaries in traditional roles have remained flat while those niche areas such as analytics, digital and innovation have increased.

According to The Future of Work Report, released in November 2016, the key to efficiently filling these new tech positions is starting early—training kids to be digitally savvy so they avoid roles set to be automated by 2030.

A clearly identifiable high-tech job trend happening now that fits well with Australia’s vast open spaces and enormous rural agriculture properties, is drone programming and operation.

A 2016 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates the global market for agricultural drones, alone, to be in excess of US$32 billion.

Turns out resourceful farmers are leading the charge in adapting drone technology to boost farm resourcefulness.

Drone usage and custom-programming hardware to fit purpose has clear-cut usages in Australian rural and farming sectors; industries traditionally associated with age-old blue-collar hard yakka, early morning milking sessions and endless fence mending.

The Future of Work guidelines suggest kids who want to stay on the land and farm, like their parents or grandparents, should skill-up at school on skills such as drone operation and programming, as well as everything else needed to operate a thriving farm.

“For the first time in many years, we’re finding it easier to attract graduates because agriculture, particularly technology in agriculture, is back on the radar,” said Felicity Hennessy, General Manager of innovation at agribusiness Ruralco.

Workers of the future, unite!

Blue-collar and high-tech is not chalk and cheese.

With high-tech infrastructure development, use of drones, robots and virtual reality will eagerly be adopted by all sectors, including those typically associated with traditional blue-collar roles.

The function of these sectors won’t change—the production of food, buildings and factory-line produce, for example, remain as future staples.

What will change is the way workers interact with their work environment. If trends in technology we use today are any indication, tomorrow’s blue-collar workers will be adapting, coding and customising hardware, without having to graduate with a degree in complex mathematics.