A whole new area of opportunity is developing around internet business but does it provide additional jobs or replace others in a more conventional setting? Reports continue to appear about the growth in the Online Jobs market and how it will have a positive impact on the number of people out of work in the UK over the next couple of years. On the surface of it this would seem to be true.
Businesses are appearing at a great rate taking advantage of the huge demand in online shopping from individual things for personal use such as presents, household equipment, fashion and books to the business to business type trade where larger scale trading occurs. We can also see the growth of existing businesses who have realised the online opportunities and have enlarged their offering, moving into online sales and therefore widening their audience massively. Both of these circumstances will mean an rise in employee numbers whether they Work From Home or in the office or factory.
Certainly in the short term this will cut down the jobless figures as existing roles carry on and people are recruited into the new roles created and developed by the firm from this exciting new source. On top of the sales processing or customer service positions there will also be increases in back room roles such as personnel, finance departments and of course in manufacturing areas. As demand on each particular organisation increases due to their successful internet marketing virtually all areas of the organization will need to grow. The company will also need to deal with larger distribution, banking and accountancy requirements meaning that there will be increased demand on outside organizations servicing the growing organisation.
However at some point, presumably after the exhilaration brought on by the spectacular increase in sales has faded, the business will need to reevaluate all of it’s elements. It may be that this takes a while to happen, however in the most smart companies they may already be expecting reductions in other sales areas. The firm may at that point see that areas such as high street sales have been negatively affected by the move towards internet business and it may be decided that it is no longer worth operating in those areas.
So ultimately we could see simply a shift in the sales arena, from the more conventional sorts such as high street shops and catalogue chains to the newer and more successful Internet Business. Jobs will vanish in the old sectors as high street shop profits drop off and organizations see a much better return on investment from their e-commerce activities. The workforce in these reducing markets will reduce and we could end up with a jobless figure that is larger than the existing one.
Of course, it’s by no means certain that there will be an increase in job seekers as a result of these trends. History from the dawn of the industrial revolution teaches us that these kinds of developments make society as a whole richer over time. A percentage of the employees losing their jobs will set up new micro businesses, and taking advantage of the changes which caused their owners to lose their jobs in the first place, enough of these businesses will grow into important employers in their own right. Thereby offrering work to those whose jobs were lost at the start of the trend.
