US accountancy and auditor recruiters have no future, research suggests

Staffing companies who supply telemarketers, accountants and auditors, and retail salespeople should get out of these sectors and move into supplying recreational therapist and athletics trainers, academic research suggests.
Fri, 24 Jan 2014Staffing companies who supply telemarketers, accountants and auditors, and retail salespeople should get out of these sectors and move into supplying recreational therapist and athletics trainers, academic research suggests.

According to a 2013 paper by academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne, ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?’, telemarketers have the highest probability of seeing their jobs replaced by computers, while recreational therapists have the lowest.  

In their paper, the academics conclude: “Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations are at risk… More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades, are highly susceptible to computerisation.

“According to our estimate, 47% of total US employment is in the high-risk category, meaning that associated occupations are potentially automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two.”

The good news for recruiters is that they have plenty of time to diversify as the paper is looking at job losses within the next two decades. Alas, the academics say nothing about how likely recruiters are to be replaced.

The top and bottom four jobs based on the probability that computerisation will lead to job losses in next two decades (1 = certain to be lost) are:

Recreational therapists    0.003
Dentists                               0.004
Athletics trainers                0.007
Clergy                                   0.008

Technical writers                    0.89
Retail salespersons             0.92
Accountants and auditors    0.94
Telemarketers                        0.99

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