This is what the jobs market of the future will look like – and why a vote for Brexit will harm your career chances

Jobs have become a core Brexit issue. Would leaving the EU be good or bad for job creation? Why are migrants taking so many of the new jobs being created in the UK, and what are the implications for the freedom of movement for labour? What about the quality of jobs, and the implications for productivity? And so on.

But the changing nature of work is an issue that runs throughout the developed world, far beyond the UK and Europe. We see this through the prism of our relationship with Europe, for the UK and Germany have become the two strongest job markets in this time zone and have accordingly been sucking in labour from elsewhere. But if you are in the US, or Canada, or Australia, the issue is more about the nature of the jobs being created and the threat to many established activities from the new technologies. For example, to what extent will artificial intelligence replace tasks that at present are carried out exclusively by human beings? To come close to home, if a computer can be programmed to write a news report on the latest unemployment figures – which it can do – how long will it be before it could write the column you are reading now? Five years, 10 years, or maybe never?

There is a rule of thumb that you can apply to what has happened to the labour market in the developed world over the past 30 years or so. It is that the growth in jobs has been at the top and bottom end of the skill range, with jobs in the middle being hollowed out. So there are more jobs for surgeons and lawyers, and more for delivery drivers and bar staff. To say that is not to disparage lower-skilled work. Quite the reverse. One of the troubles of our society is that we don’t have enough respect for lower-skilled but essential jobs, and don’t do enough to make “bad” jobs better. But there is growth. By contrast, and to over-simplify, blue collar production line jobs have been replaced by robots and white collar clerical ones by computers.

The great question now is whether this hollowing-out of the middle will intensify further as a result of what has been dubbed the fourth Industrial Revolution. The first was driven by the railways, coal and steel. The second by electricity, cars and other consumer goods. The third by electronics and computerisation. And now the issue is whether artificial intelligence, the internet of things, big data and so on will make as big a change to the way we live and work as the moving production line’s cheap consumer goods did 100 years ago.

So what do we know? There have been a number of studies that seek to identify the jobs that will go and the jobs that will grow. The gist of these is that there will be growth in personal services, particularly caring for the old and infirm, and growth in high-tech and creative activities. This is fine as far as it goes. The problem is when you try to apply these principles to the real world. Thus information services are usually forecast to be growth areas, but technology has changed the focus of information. Data management is growing, conventional journalism shrinking. Ten years ago the forecasts were that financial services would grow as the need for intermediation would climb. That has proved wrong. The industry has shrunk.

What you can do is set out some principles. The first is that we should admit that we don’t know where the jobs of the future will be, just as a decade ago we did not know what a lot of the jobs of the present would be now. App developer? There was no such job or the idea of an app for a mobile phone did not exist until the iPhone came along.

Another principle is that a good general education is the best way to prepare the workforce of the future, for people are likely to have to change careers several times during their life. It follows that retraining in mid-career will become the norm. Still another is that in a world of greater employment uncertainty people need financial resilience, which means they need both more savings and more ability to manage their lifetime finances.

Finally we need to accept that the market will signal what jobs are needed and where those jobs are needed, because there will be demand for those particular skills. The job magnets will pull people towards them, whatever and wherever they are.

This brings us back to Brexit. The European economy, taken as a whole, is more efficient if people can migrate to the places where their skills are most in demand. The economy, again taken as a whole, can generate more wealth if someone who would be unemployed in the south of Italy can get a job in Britain, assuming that he or she does not out someone already in Britain onto the dole. But the scale of change that migration makes to the job market are smaller than the scale that result from technological advance. We maybe can do something about migration, but probably not much. We can do nothing about technology, except to embrace it as best we can, and therefore benefit from it.