This story is from the Washington Post – and I’ve put my ten cents in too. It will be ignored in Australia but the pandemic has changed the nature of the jobs market.

It shows how important Australian TAFE and universities will be to retrain people.

Millions of jobs are unlikely to come back, US economists warn, setting up a massive need for career changes and retraining in America.

The coronavirus pandemic has triggered permanent shifts in how and where people work.

Businesses are planning for a future where more people are working from home, traveling less for business, or replacing workers with robots.

I’ll bet the same phenomena will happen in Australian cities too. Having a properly functioning TAFE and university system will be imperative.

Many US workers will not be able to do the same job they did before the pandemic, even after much of the U.S. population gets vaccinated against the virus.

Microsoft founder-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates raised eyebrows in November when he predicted that half of business travel and 30 percent of “days in the office” would go away forever.

That forecast no longer seems far-fetched. In a report coming out later this week that was previewed to The Washington Post, the McKinsey Global Institute says that 20 percent of business travel won’t come back and about 20 percent of workers could end up working from home indefinitely.

 I wrote an opinion piece on this five years ago in Adelaide about people working from home, although I could never guess the current circumstances then.

These shifts mean fewer jobs at hotels, restaurants and CBD shops, in addition to ongoing automation of office support roles and some factory jobs.

“We think that there is a very real scenario in which a lot of low-wage jobs in retail and in food service will disappear in the coming years,” said Susan Lund, head of the McKinsey Global Institute. “It means that we’re going to need a lot more short-term training and credentialing programs.”