While digitalization may have cost millions of jobs worldwide, it has also created practically unlimited new job opportunities for the tech savvy, especially for millennials — those born in the 1980s and 1990s. Already, this age group dominates the local workforce but few of them actually fit the bill.

The phenomenon of old jobs lost and new jobs awaiting is reminiscent of the transitional period from the 19th to the 20th century when motor vehicles replaced horse-drawn transportation, so the renowned economist Rhenald Kasali from the University of Indonesia reflects in his latest book Disruption.

Thousands of farmers, blacksmiths and carters became jobless then but new jobs arose in automotive engineering, road construction, traffic management and insurance, among others. Today, the new jobs require skills in information and technology (IT), analysis and creative thinking. Gone are the repetitive and administrative jobs that can be more efficiently done by machines.

International management consulting giant McKinsey & Co. has foreseen that digitization has the potential to create 3.7 million jobs and improve workers’ productivity significantly in Indonesia between 2016 and 2025.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) forecasts new employment opportunities will arise mostly in such sectors as business and financial operations, management, computer and mathematics, architecture and engineering, sales, education and training.

Today, innumerable new jobs that people would never have heard of 10 to 20 years ago are present in various sectors from lifestyle industries to banking and manufacturing. Consider these: barista, blogger, app developer, smart control-room operator, game developer, dog whisperer, drone operator and many more.

Various firms, state lender Bank Mandiri for instance, have come up with posts like IT security, IT risk management, data scientist, enterprise data management and decision analyst. Publicly listed consumer goods giant Unilever Indonesia has specific teams to develop e-commerce potential to partner with digital entities, social media consultants and specialists.

While skills required for those jobs are getting more and more specific, employers are compelled to provide appropriate facilities and ambience to stimulate creativity and cater to various workforce generations’ characteristics, especially the millennials.

Millennials account for more than 40 percent of the Indonesian workforce, rising to 60 percent by 2020.

The Center of Reform on Economics (CORE) Indonesia executive director, Mohammad Faisal, said millennials tended to be more competitive and dynamic or likely to job-hop more than the previous generations as a result of their shaping environments. They also tend to prioritize a work — life balance over financial rewards.

“Millennials are shaped by demands for higher skills amid fast-changing IT advancement that makes them efficiency-oriented and they frown upon inflexible working hours. They also grew up in an era when information was readily accessible and transportation very easy so they’re very mobile,” he told the Post.

With such traits, companies are competing to provide the most accommodative facilities to create a conducive ambience in the digital era.

Unilever and state telecommunication firm Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom) are among those most agile in adjusting themselves to digitization and accommodating millennials.

Unilever has shifted from attendance-based systems to outcome-based ones for their employees’ performance appraisal model. Workers are not obliged to come to the office and are allowed to work anytime and anywhere at their convenience.

For those who opt to work in the office, the multinational company has designed its 5-hectare headquarters in BSD City, Banten, for them, too. To create a relaxed ambience, the office has been built with a green concept. There, employees do not have fixed desks; they can work anywhere in the building and freely interact with colleagues. The head office is also equipped with a fitness gym, yoga center and daycare.

“The spatial planning inside Graha Unilever supports flexibility and agility in working as well as colleagues bonding […]. This is our new standard to support employees’ dynamics and productivity,” Nanang Chalid, Unilever head of human resources (HR), says.

Telkom, meanwhile, has created a mobile app for its employees to submit work reports, request leave, conduct performance appraisal, get payment slips and many more, for efficiency’s sake. It also operates employee buses fitted with digital devices that staff can work with and mark their attendance while commuting.

In view of the revolutionary changes that digitization brings to work, Forum Human Capital Indonesia (FHCI) director Sulung Raspati suggests that human capital management acts as a business partner for firms. Employers will have to be agile in creating new positions, seeking and maintaining the right people instead of just implementing administrative routines.

“HR needs to have profound business knowledge and vision in this sort of transition time. If a firm goes bankrupt, it could be partly blamed on HR incompetence; it’s not necessarily [the fault of] business operations,” he told The Jakarta Post.

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