Telenor survey: Bangladesh’s millennials assess future careers, digital technology impact, robotic replacement risk

The results indicate that the nation’s young adults see the importance of technology in their vocational paths, yet believe that career success requires both technical and human skills, even if results show that 100% of respondents think robots in the workplace will be a part of our future. The multi-market ‘Jobs of the Future’ survey obtained 4,200 respondents aged 15 to 25, in Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Myanmar and Pakistan. It was conducted via targeting through the Telenor Group Facebook with a sample size of 700 secondary school, or university students per market used in the results analysis. “Our Facebook channel reaches an active, young – and largely Asian – following, so we felt that this would be a great place to pilot such a survey,” said Sheena Lim, director of Social Media, Telenor Group. “We thought this would combine the fun, engaging side of social media surveys with potentially interesting insights into Asian youth attitudes on technology and their future careers.” In Bangladesh, 60% of millennials said they were ‘excited’ about future opportunities in the internet and digital sectors, with the largest majority (30%) saying they were ‘extremely excited.’ Additionally 59% in Bangladesh said mobile/internet technology will be ‘important’ in their career by 2020, mirroring the average of 63% of youth aggregated in all six nations who agreed with this.  Indicating just how significant youth in Bangladesh think it is, only 1.4% stated that technology is ‘not really important’ for their futures. The surveyed youth in all but one of the countries agreed that non-technical skills will also be important for jobs of the future. The highest numbers of Bangladeshi (34%), Pakistani (37%) and Indian (36%) and youth maintained that the most important skills to a great future job will be the ‘ability to inspire others, and leadership capability.’ More than one in four of the surveyed Singaporean youth regard ‘people management and emotional intelligence’ (27%). All of the Bangladeshi youth surveyed agreed that robots will replace humans in many future professions, as did all the participating countries. On which jobs robots would most likely replace humans in, 44% of Bangladeshi respondents predicted that the manufacturing and engineering industries would see the most machine takeovers. Bangladesh’s millennials also appeared enthusiastic for a technology-driven future. Youth in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar and India all agreed with the statement: ‘It’s important to understand all kinds of technology-I want to know as much as I can!,’ with Myanmar topping the scale at 34%  of respondents while Bangladesh at 30%.