When a dishevelled zealot holds up a placard on a packed street, shouting "the end is nigh", they are at best politely ignored. Yet when the media does it, people buy newspapers. So it should be no surprise that the narrative of an imminent jobs apocalypse at the sleek, chrome hand of automation should have been so successful in recent years. Some businesses profit from threats, which perhaps explains the origin of the robots-taking-our-jobs hysteria: consultancies publishing a succession of breathless reports into the coming age of AI, which conveniently enough can become a profitable opportunity if you pay for their expensive digital transformation services. The reality is that, as with any other attempt at long-term prognostication, we don't really know to what extent automation will disrupt or indeed destroy the job market as we know it. The future is inherently unpredictable, although it would be odd to dismiss the clear trend of the last ten, 40 or even 200 years (depending on which industrial revolution you want to start with): we are automating more.

A few years ago, consulting giant McKinsey predicted that artificial intelligence and automation would eliminate a 73 million jobs by 2030. That's a scary number of jobs, and a prediction that led many professionals to evaluate their own skills and research ways to future-proof their careers from the coming automation/AI job apocalypse. In the absence of an elder expert giving you one word of advice, like "Plastics!" what can an IT professional (or a new graduate) do to ensure that the robots don't come to take your job? That's been a key question over the past few years, and one without that simple one-word answer. Experts have said that jobs focused on implementing and managing artificial intelligence and automation would be great avenues for job-seekers to pursue.