Will a robot be replacing you at your job? It will depend on what skills you have, according to Bryan Hong, professor of entrepreneurship and management at the UMKC Henry W. Bloch School of Management. 

According to new research conducted by Hong and his coauthors, adding robots to an enterprise increases demand for jobs requiring a bachelor's degree or higher, as well as jobs requiring no postsecondary education. But those with a vocational education or a community college education, as well as managerial roles, weren't so lucky.

This conclusion was reached after studying five years of data on businesses in the Canadian economy. Their research is among the first of its kind to show how robots are changing employment, the structure of organizations and other aspects of the workplace.

"A lot of people are already getting the sense that this is a new trend, and our data shows that investments in robotics are really taking off," Hong said. "This is a trend that's only going to continue."

Hong breaks down the research for us on what it means and how it will affect the future of employment.

The main question is, are robots taking our jobs?

That's a tough question to answer with a simple 'yes' or 'no.' It's complicated. What we found is there are very different answers depending on who you are inside the company when the robots come in. If you are someone with a bachelor's degree or above, which is one measure of workers with relatively high skills, we see an increase in the number of employees. There's also an increase in what we might call "unskilled" employees or those who have no postsecondary education, doing roles that require very little training. But if you are in a class of jobs that require a vocational degree, like tradespeople who have gone to a two-year college or gotten a certificate, these jobs are being eliminated by the robots. We also see a significant decline in managers.

Let's start with the groups that are experiencing increases in employment. Why is there an increase in the group with college degrees and "unskilled workers"?

When you buy robots, you need people who have the skills to work with them. For example, robots may have to programmed or you might need to do a lot more design work if robots are producing many different types of products than the factory used to produce. That requires people with the skills to do those things. The increase in unskilled workers is a different story. It turns out that robots aren't good at doing all physical labor tasks — the technology has its limitations. So for these types of tasks, such as loading trucks with inventory, humans are still needed because the robots can't do them well. But these aren't jobs that require a lot of education or training and are also not likely to pay high wages.

Why are workers with a community college or vocational education being negatively impacted?

The type of work robots are capable of is often what humans with vocational degrees do. For example, it could be welding a passenger door onto the body of a car. Now imagine a robotic arm that will repeatedly do that task, over and over again. That robot can do that same task flawlessly thousands of times a day. Robots can do that, and they don't get tired. They also don't unionize and don't raise the same safety issues that using humans might. So, you can see why a company would look at that and think it's compelling.

If I am one of those workers, should I be nervous about these findings?

Yes, it's a cause for concern. The issue is that robots increasingly do what these workers can do, and in many cases, do it better. This is also part of a larger story many people have already heard, but not about robots specifically. Many people who lose these jobs are unlikely to move on to higher-paying jobs so often the best-case scenario is that their wages will decline if they are able to find a new job. This raises a much broader set of questions about the increasing inequality we see in our society, and robots may at least be partly responsible for it.

What's going on with managers?

As of today, robots don't manage people. So we think the reason we see fewer managers speaks to the question of 'what do managers really do.' When we think of managers in companies, we usually think of someone who supervises workers every day. They keep an eye on things and make sure that employees are getting the work done. If you imagine a manager on a factory floor, maybe they also deal with whatever problems come up each day. Now, if we replace over half of the employees with robots on an assembly line, do you need as many managers to make sure that people are doing their jobs? Probably not. But it's also not this simple. One could imagine that the increase in jobs requiring at least a bachelor's degree and unskilled jobs would require more managers to oversee them, but it's clear that even if that is true, the total need for managers still decreases. That might suggest that managing each type of worker requires a different type of management. But that's something that needs more research for us to understand better.

What does this mean for the future of some of these jobs?

Companies invest in technology because it improves their profitability. If it is more profitable to use robots instead of humans for certain tasks, companies will ultimately move in that direction. If we look at the results of our story, it's clear there are some types of workers who will be negatively affected. We need to think about how to address that as a society.