Many people are watching the increase in automation with a wary eye, well aware that in many cases, this simple shift has the potential to cost them their jobs. As a teacher and trainer, however, you can rest assured that automation isn't in danger of costing you your job any time soon.
While automation can offer a number of key advantages to many companies, there will always remain crucial things that an in-person instructor can offer, that automation simply can't.
Creativity is human
Creative instruction will always beat static instructional methods and someone has to develop the creativity that goes into those lessons. Teachers and trainers are responsible not just for conveying information, but for finding an interesting way to do it. One that will capture the attention of the students or trainees and provides them with devices that will help keep it in their minds. While automation can certainly call that information forth, it can't generate it on its own, nor can it come up with that information on the fly.
Personal Interaction
During the training process, it's necessary to connect closely with students in order to improve their odds of educational success. The cliche, "Students don't care what you know until they know that you care," applies to both young students and older trainees. That personal touch, however, is something that simply can't be conveyed through automation. While some students will certainly be able to absorb that information on their own due to personal, intrinsic motivations, others need that personal touch in order to shape their understanding and their desire to learn the material. Jobs that require that personal touch will likely be among the last to be replaced by automation--and that makes your position still vital.
Guiding and Shaping
For most educators, automation fails to touch on job security. If anything, it simply makes some aspects of the job easier! Depending on the age of the student and the type of job completed by an educator or trainer, 20% or less of daily job tasks can be successfully automated. Guiding and shaping developing minds, from younger minds that are still learning the basics to older minds that are learning new skills, can't be done by an algorithm. While this may be particularly true of young children, who respond far better to human contact than to artificial constructs, it remains true at any stage of development.
Judgement Calls
One of the biggest benefits offered by a human trainer over a robot is empathy. Humans possess the ability to understand difficult to situations: to realise that an individual struggling with other issues may not be able to give their full focus to the task at hand and to shift instruction accordingly. Automation will never be able to make judgement calls with the same success rate as human intelligence. Human trainers can connect with their students, understand what's going on in their lives, and provide them with what they need in order to be successful in a way that a programmed system simply can't.
While automation continues to grow and there is a wide range of tasks that can now be taken care of by robots and other artificial sources, in the case of training and education, these tools simply make the educator's job easier, rather than taking it away. While some training sessions may certainly benefit from increased artificial sources, others need the human touch of an educator in the room with the trainees.
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