About two weeks ago, Standard Bank announced that it would be cutting up to 1,200 jobs and potentially closing 91 branches because of slow economic growth and digitisation.
This is the kind of news that should be causing higher education institutions to perhaps panic a little bit about what we offer in terms of career guidance.
Banking was one of those sectors that we always relied on to absorb our graduates regardless of discipline.
Banks have for the longest time been willing to offer graduates a path from basic training to high-level specialisation.
With the introduction of artificial intelligence systems, it’s likely that not only are employment opportunities for graduates going to shrink at the entry, but the path to the top is also going to get narrower.
As a lecturer, I have noted that Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Commerce graduates are struggling to find the kind of employment track they expect their degree to get them in the labour market.
Many graduates with four-year degrees are finding themselves qualifying for basic call centre work, on short-term contracts, with no prospects of improvement within the employing companies.
What matters here is that what seems to be disappearing is the career track – that is, the idea that you can start somewhere at the bottom and move up in the company.
Graduates are getting internships that go nowhere.
This means that one’s career hits a dead end in the early phases.
I call it “early career dead ending” and it’s a reality our graduates are facing when they start out in the labour market.
Worse still, it is not clear exactly what skills are required in this new economy because digitisation is able to replace everything from communication skills to very specialised technical capacities.
Whereas once we used to train BA students to build themselves a competitive advantage by developing broad analytical skills, it turns out certain forms of software are far better at this than the average human brain.
A well-developed artificial intelligence system can do a better employee assessment than a seasoned Human Resources practitioner.
These trends seem to be accelerating.
Sooner or later, this “early career dead ending” will affect fields such as Information Technology and Accounting, which once saw themselves as being the crème de la crème of graduate degrees.
Given this reality, it is misleading for higher education institutions to claim that a degree still promises the greatest chance for employment in the economy.
Clearly if an Honours degree is getting you a job that once did not even require a matric, this is no argument for the value of a degree at all.
This situation requires some radical rethinking of not only education, but of the very state of being human today.
Much of this artificial intelligence is designed mostly for profit maximisation.
No human being can compete with machines in that regard.
The fact that we cannot beat these machines is leading people to simply say we must accept the inevitable, they will replace us.
But in fact, the machines cannot replace us when it comes to the age-old questions – what is to be human, and how ought we live together and with other creatures?
Currently, we face massive ecological and social crises that require creative thinking and new social arrangements.
We need to prepare our graduates to be able to think about being human problem solvers in the world of climate change, poverty and inequality, war, large-scale migration etc.
No machine can answer for us, “what is the human response to migration”.
No machine can answer “what is citizenship in the context of wealth inequality?”
Equally, no machine can adjudicate the ethics questions of the relationship between commercial interests and public interest.
As the digital revolution advances, we face some big questions.
What we cannot do is lie to our graduates about what reality awaits them...