Do You Need Foot Soldiers Or Keyboard Warriors Today?

A movie I watched recently, had an exceptionally good drone pilot that went against his boss's orders not to bomb an enemy target.

His punishment saw him reassigned to the frontline where he had to deliver medical supplies outside the safe wire zone.

The experience exposed him to life-threatening situations. The rules of engagement were different from those that applied when behind the drone controls from inside a container.

The humbling experience equipped him with empathy, a quality that he lacked before the reassignment. This experience made him whole and a lot more responsible behind the controls once again. Ironically but luckily too, his job has both technology-based and boots-on-ground aspects.

The world today is increasingly adapting to technology-dependent jobs and moving away from human labour-intensive jobs. Governments have caught on with several services now provided online. It has the double benefit of serving as an intelligence-gathering process for the government.

The banking sector has for a while now experienced growth in keyboarding warriors. We saw jobs lost here in Kenya because a bank centralised its operations in Asia. And as that happened, the jobs created in Asia were less than half of those lost in Kenya.

Those organisations that have chosen to remain staff-heavy on humanitarian grounds have found themselves gasping in the market share war, in the wake of leaner competitors who have passed down savings to consumers. And so the humanitarian types are now forced to cut down their labour costs as well.

Whichever way we look at it, keyboarding is winning and boots on the ground are losing out. Many people still live a blended life. For instance, a house-help has manual chores to do and in between them, they go online with their phones to communicate or transact. This category of workers are tec gamblers heavy in football bets and all from their phones.

Everyone today has a bit of both worlds.

So do we need to have the more of the expensive foot soldiers or keyboard warriors in business?

How I answer this question determines how many friends I will still have left at the end of it. I have no good news and on this, I am just a messenger.

The world is forcing everyone to move out of their comfort zones. The future office requires people with specific skills and perhaps gained from online schools. The usual university education is under severe threat and institutions of higher learning are responding in ways that may change their overall composition.

The good news is that the physical tasks won't vanish completely but they will change in form. For example, you are white collared at work and on weekends you are blue collared selling wares and foodstuff off your car boot.

None of the options is as comforting as before but it is what it is, a new work order.

So do not panic, humanity is not getting extinct, we are simply adjusting to new ways of working. We still need both keyboard and foot soldiers. Your dexterity will serve you well.