The Economic Impacts of ICT: Employment Structure and Working Practices

Introduction


Hi, I'm Luca and I am a student in year 10 at St. Francis Xavier's College in Woolton, Liverpool. One of the subjects I am currently studying at school is ICT, and I am going to share my knowledge and understanding of this subject with everyone in a series of blogs. In this particular blog, I will be discussing one of the economic impacts of ICT - employment structure and working practises. I hope that you enjoy this blog, and come away learning something new which you can hopefully pass on to someone else.


How Jobs Have Been Affected

ICT has affected jobs in many ways. It has became a lot more common for jobs to involve ICT nowadays, where as in the past hardly any jobs involved ICT. For example, some jobs have been revolutionised like administrators who used to keep paper based records will now keep them as documents on a computer, or typists who used to use a type writer to do their work will use a computer to do so. This has been the case with many other jobs too.

Another example of how jobs have changed because of ICT is in banking and retail. In the past, a person would have to physically go to a bank or shop to either take their money out or buy something. Nowadays, the banks have employed a lot more people to work on computers for customers to be able to take their money out, check their account balance etc, and shops have designed their own websites which allow customers to purchase products online instead of going into the shop itself.

Also, robots are now being used a lot more to do jobs, and have replaced human workers in a lot of cases. IT has also created many new jobs,  such as call centre workers and teleworking. This also shows that IT skills are needed in a lot of jobs in our modern society, such as the ability to programs such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel.

Finally, the Internet is obviously available to people world wide, which means people can now work from home instead of going into work. This can also be easier for customers sometimes who are buying online.