Out with milkmen and Blockbuster, in with AI robots and space travel
From knocking on windows to renting out videos and manually connecting phone calls, these 15 jobs vanished when technology came to town and new jobs were born – see the surprising list
READING LEVEL: ORANGE
Between the second coming of the “golden age” of space exploration and near daily AI advances, new jobs are being created that your parents and grandparents may have real trouble comprehending.
But the reverse is likely also true. You may find it hard to believe that people were once paid to wake up workers by tapping on their bedroom windows with long poles – but they were known as “knocker-ups” or “knocker-uppers” and were a common sight in industrial Britain, in some places right up until the 1970s.
You may also struggle to imagine that thousands of people around Australia once made a living manually connecting telephone calls via a physical switchboard, while others delivered telegrams, lit street lamps, performed complex calculations by hand, long before computers existed, and so much more.
Some of you may even have parents old enough to remember the local milkman delivering glass bottles of cold milk to the whole neighbourhood very early each morning back when they were kids.
But times change – and according to business marketplace AnyBusiness.com.au, professions that once employed thousands of Australians have vanished in little more than a generation, as technology continues to transform how people live, work and communicate.
AnyBusiness director of operations Mary Tamvakologos said the list of ghost jobs showed how quickly industries and jobs could change.
“Most people assume the jobs around them will always exist because they are familiar. History shows that is rarely the case,” Ms Tamvakologos said.
She noted that many of the careers on the list were stable, respectable professions in their day. Whole training and development programs, businesses and industries were built around many such jobs.
“What changed wasn’t necessarily the underlying customer need,” Ms Tamvakologos said. “People still wanted information, entertainment, communication and convenience. Technology simply created faster and more efficient ways to deliver them.”
While many of the jobs on the list disappeared gradually, others collapsed suddenly, as new technologies became mainstream*.
The rise of streaming services rapidly destroyed demand for video rental stores, for example; the Blockbuster franchise was one of the major casualties in Australia.
You may have heard the Blockbuster name, or perhaps seen a closed storefront or logo somewhere.
Today it’s hard to convey how important the video store was to a generation of teenagers. These stores featured heavily in Gen X and Y’s adolescent experience, plus their American counterparts featured in video stores in so many TV shows and classic films made or set in the 1980s and ‘90s. Your parents may have already shared nostalgic* stories about such stores – and perhaps they even worked at one after school or in school holidays. But they’re all gone now and when the end came, it felt fast and took people of a certain age by surprise.
Videos and DVDs weren’t the only tech dinosaurs to end up extinct*. Search engines also largely vastly reduced the use of printed encyclopedias* and other reference texts like dictionaries and atlases*.
Smartphones effectively combined the old home phone (which was plugged in and sometimes fixed to the wall in the least private room of the house) with alarm clocks, cameras, maps, calculators, music players and numerous other stand-alone products.
Suddenly it was all available on a single device you could put in your pocket and take everywhere with you.
Ms Tamvakologos said the smartphone lesson among many others remained just as relevant today.
“One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is assuming current customer behaviour is permanent,” she said.
“The companies that survive major shifts are usually the ones paying attention to how consumer* habits are changing before those changes become obvious.
“Every business owner should occasionally ask themselves a simple question: if this business was launched for the first time today, would it look the same? If the answer is no, there is probably an opportunity hiding in that gap.”
History is full of examples of successful, in-demand jobs that simply disappeared, sometimes overnight.
Ms Tamvakologos said the vanishing act happened “because the business believed customers would always behave the way they did yesterday”, whereas consumer habits tend to adapt and change with the times.
“The businesses that endure tend to be the ones willing to adapt before they are forced to,” she said.
POLL
GLOSSARY
- extinct: not existing in the world anymore
- encyclopaedia: a book or set of books containing many articles arranged in alphabetical order that deal either with the whole of human knowledge or with a particular part of it
- atlases: books containing maps
- mainstream: common and shared by most people, or representing such beliefs or behaviour
- nostalgic: feeling happy and also slightly sad when you think about things that happened in the past
- consumer: a person who buys goods or services for their own use
EXTRA READING
Oz ideas that changed the world
Great ideas that started in garages
QUICK QUIZ
- What two names were given to the person whose job was to tap a tall pole on the window to wake up workers?
- What did the milkman do?
- What featured heavily in the adolescent experience of Gen X and Y?
- What combination of smartphone features used to be individual items?
- What was the name of the video store franchise that went out of business in Australia?
LISTEN TO THIS STORY
CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
1. Do the job!
Choose one of the jobs listed in the story. Imagine that this is your job. Write a diary entry for a typical day in your working life. Use your research skills to find out more about the job itself.
Time: allow at least 45 minutes for this activity
Curriculum Links: English, History
2. Extension
What are some jobs that you think will never disappear, even though technology might change the way they are done? Choose three jobs that you think fit in this category. For each job, write sentences explaining why you chose it.
Time: allow at least 30 minutes for this activity
Curriculum Links: English, Information Technology, Critical and Creative Thinking
VCOP ACTIVITY
Base word, opposite and up-level
Create a four column table. Write “base word” at the top of the first column, “up-level it” at the top of the second column, “antonym” at the top of the third column and “up-level it” at the top of the last column.
Pick three words from the glossary to use in your table. They might already be high level words, so use them in the first “up-level” column.
Think of a base level synonym (a simpler word) you could use instead of the glossary word. Add this to the “base word” column.
Come up with an antonym (opposite) for the word and add that to the third column. Up-level that word and put that in the final “up-level it” column.
Why do you think the glossary word was chosen as the best word to use in that article?