A complete new area of opportunity is opening up around internet business but does it offer extra jobs or replace others in a more conventional setting? Reports continue to appear about the development in the Online Jobs market and how it will have a positive impact on the number of unemployed in the UK over the next couple of years. On the surface of it this would seem to be right.
Firms are appearing at a great rate taking advantage of the massive demand in online shopping from individual objects for personal use such as presents, household equipment, clothes and books to the business to business type trade where larger scale trading takes place. We can also see the growth of existing firms who have realised the online opportunities and have expanded 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 reduce the jobless figures as existing roles continue and people are recruited into the new positions created and developed by the business from this exciting new source. On top of the sales processing or customer service jobs there will also be increases in administration roles such as personnel, finance departments and of course in production areas. As demand on each particular organisation increases due to their successful internet marketing virtually all areas of the company will need to grow. The company will also need to handle larger distribution, banking and accountancy requirements meaning that there will be increased demand on outside organizations servicing the growing organisation.
However at some point, possibly after the exhilaration brought on by the spectacular increase in sales has faded, the business will need to reevaluate all of it’s sectors. It may be that this takes a while to happen, however in the most perceptive companies they may already be anticipating falls in other sales areas. The business may at that point see that areas such as high street sales have been negatively affected by the move towards internet marketing and it may be decided that it is no longer worth being active in those areas.
So ultimately we could see simply a shift in the sales arena, from the more traditional sorts such as high street shops and catalogue chains to the newer and more successful Internet Business. Jobs will be lost 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 shrinking markets will reduce and we could end up with a jobless stat that is larger than the existing one.
Of course, it’s by no means sure 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 types of developments make society as a whole richer over time. A proportion of the workers losing their jobs will set up new micro businesses, and taking advantage of the trends which caused their owners to lose their jobs in the first place, enough of these companies will grow into important employers in their own right. Thereby soaking up those whose jobs were lost at the beginning of the trend.
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