If there’s ever a time you need to learn to earn it is NOW.

You need to up-skill and level up before you are replaced or displaced. You need to be ahead of the game before everyone else works it out. Don’t let the next 5 years be a continuum of more of the same.

You need to choose to take action, rather than be acted upon.

Don’t think your company will save you by training you. No profit-driven, commercially-driven company will invest in you as an individual when they can invest that same money in machines that turn up reliably for work each day without complaint, sickness or injury.

Company margins are being constantly squeezed by new technologies and a global marketplace which leaves training funds tightly contested between those who deserve it most.

If you’re sitting there reading this thinking you have time on your side, you are wrong.

Hoping you have enough time to hang in there with your current job and make it through to retirement or the next restructure round before the machines take over is a flawed and short-sighted strategy. Hope has never been a strategy.

You will be working longer so why don’t you earn more whilst you are?

As humans, we have a fallibility to underestimate the long term and over-estimate the short term. We think automation, redundancy or restructures won’t happen to us, just like the boiling frog in the pan. The reality is it is according to Oxford University researchers, this going to happen to 1 in 3 of us. That’s an alarming fact.

Why you need to keep learning so you can keep earning

An analysis of American wage growth by economists at the New York Federal Reserve showed that: 

“The bulk of earnings growth took place between the ages of 25 and 35; on average, after the age of 45 only the top 2% of lifetime earners see any earnings growth.”

This means you’ve hit an earnings plateau and it’s time you pushed on for higher honours. You’re only going to be able to achieve that with the right set of skills that work in the real world that mean you become so good they can't ignore you.

Why do you need to commit to life long learning?

In the world of automation, AI, bots and machine learning you need to learn how to earn so you remain relevant and irreplaceable.

“One thing that almost all economists agree on is that change is coming and that its scale and scope will be unprecedented. Automation will impact different geographies, genders, and socioeconomic classes differently,”

Only by taking action you be in control, have more confidence about your future prospects and increase your earning potential.