Читать книгу The Construction Technology Handbook - Hugh Seaton - Страница 22

In the coming years, Baby Boomers are going to continue to leave the industry because they retire, can't physically do the work, or for other reasons. Boomers are the largest generation in history, except for their kids, the millennials – it is a lot of people. Boomers are typically considered anyone born between 1946 and 1965, Gen X is 1966 to 1985, and Millennials are between 1986 and 2005.

Gen X as a group is a few million smaller than either Millennials or Boomers, which means that Millennials are going to be in decision‐making roles much earlier in their careers than would naturally be the case. And the thing about Millennials is that they are not just “tech‐savvy” – having grown up with the internet and smartphones, Millennials are intolerant of tech‐averse workplaces. For companies looking to grow, or just replace leaving Boomers, remaining pre‐digital will have a serious cost in terms of ability to attract and keep young talent.

Demographics are like a slow moving wave that people usually ignore, though they can easily see it coming. And just like a big ocean wave, demographics are inevitable. This demographic wave of technology‐demanding Millennials is going to have huge impacts on the construction industry, and not just on the technology adoption front. As an example, Millennials buy homes at a much lower rate than Gen X or Boomers, and we're already seeing that fact change the shape of suburbs and cities, a change that will only accelerate as Boomers retire.

The key takeaway is that, whether it's because they demand it, innovate it, or are in a position to make the decision to purchase it, more and more technology will be used on the jobsite and across the construction value chain because of Millennials.

But demographics have another impact across the world – a radical change in the parts of the world that have enough working age people, and those that have too few. In the past 200 years, every national population has gone through a period of boom, then slow decline as the establishment of basic healthcare and sanitation causes an imbalance between dropping death rates and still‐high birth rates, followed by an almost universal dropping of birth rates over the decades to levels that are too low for the native population to replace itself. This pattern is leading to shrinking populations in most of Europe, Japan, and soon, China. Africa, in contrast, is exploding in population, and will continue to do so for some years.

This aging of the population in the north and surging growth in the south will have big implications for where construction happens, how it happens, and how many young people are available in the local market to work in construction. As an industry that faced years of labor shortages, this will be another driver of technology adoption as we seek to augment human workers with technology of varying kinds.

Far from automation taking jobs, in Europe, North America, and much of Asia, automation will save jobs by making projects possible that wouldn't have been possible without it.