The Impact of Industry 4.0 on Jobs Creation within the Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises and Family Businesses in Slovakia

Abstract

Industry 4.0 has been creating new jobs for several years, and people are already being employed in work positions that did not exist ten years ago. Due to the speed and complexity of the changes brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it will be necessary to respond adequately and flexibly to this challenge. This research paper is devoted to the issue of Industry 4.0 outbreak into industrial enterprises, while the issue of job structure will become an increasingly urgent one. The main objective of this problem-oriented quantitative type of research is based on the analysis of the state and course of Industry 4.0 implementation process to estimate the impact of Industry 4.0 concept implementation on job creation in small and medium-sized enterprises and family businesses in Slovak Republic. A questionnaire survey in small and medium-sized enterprises in Slovak Republic was chosen as the fundamental research method. The results have shown that new technologies will increasingly displace physical labor in particular, and emerging jobs will put ever-increasing demands on human intellect. The conclusions from our findings can be the basis for the creation of educational programs not only within the workplace but also in the educational system in Slovak Republic.

The Impact of Industry 4.0 on Employees—Insights from Australia

“…The available literature studies confirm that the impact of Industry 4.0 on human work will depend on the type of work performed [49], and that organizations will change their functioning mainly as a result of greater digitization [35,40,52] and robotization [49]. In these categories, the results presented in the literature are consistent with those obtained in Australia.…”

“…All statements provided by respondents found confirmation in the selected articles: simple physical/manual works will be replaced or liquidated [32,38,41,52], health & safety will improve [38,42], possibility of job loss by low-skilled workers [38,52]. There is agreement in the literature that I4.0 will contribute to the emergence of new professions [35,40,41]. However, only one article gives a specific example: coacher robot [38].…”

“…The impact of I4.0 on the labor market, required worker skills and competences [26,35,36,39,40,45,48].…”

“…There are also very few articles that use in-depth interview [48], semi-structured interview [50] or structured interview questionnaire [33,45] as research methods. Often the results in qualitative form are very general and do not describe specific issues, e.g., [34,40,43,44]. Based on the literature review (Table 1) in the author's opinion, it can be formulated hypothesis that the impact of Industry 4.0 on employees/jobs is different depending on the country/industry it relates to.…”

“…The synthesis of the obtained results and their comparison with the literature are presented in Table 5. [12,33,34,43,44,46,49,51] change in functioning of organizations greater digitization and robotization [35,40,47,49,50,52] employee's role in I4.0 not changed significantly [43,44] the most important skills/competences in I4.0 technical skills, problem solving, coding skills, analytical skills, ability to work under pressure [25,35,36,39,42,[44][45][46]48] employers' expectations towards employees diligence, problem-solving orientation, activity in finding solutions, ability to learn, openness to change [36,39,48] employees' fluctuations both hiring new employees and training the existing ones will take place [39] preparation employees for I4.0 courses & trainings related to I4.0, self-learning [36,50] technologies with the greatest impact on labor market AI, automatics & robotics [29,33] impact of I4.0 on labor market simple physical/manual works will be replaced or liquidated, health & safety will improve, possibility of job loss by low-skilled workers [12,26,[31][32][33]38,…”