Automation is often framed as beneficial purely to business: and with productivity increased and overheads cut, it’s easy to see why employers would find it an attractive prospect. For workers, however, automation can be somewhat more complicated – often leading to job losses, many have a fraught relationship with technological change in the workplace.

But for some, it offers something else: opportunity. Nia works in an office in Cardiff; her role, as an executive officer for an independent regulator in Wales, is currently undergoing significant change due to automation.

“At the moment, not very much of my job is automated,” she says. “But it’s something we’re looking to do; we got a quote to automate part of my job within the last two months. It’s something that’s happening around me at the moment.”

Much of Nia’s role involves data entry; it’s this her employer is looking to automate.

In Nia’s case, automation is unlikely to put her out of a job – instead, she’ll have the opportunity to work on more specialised projects, removing what she describes as the “drudgery” from her role. “I spend hours of my day doing a few, monotonous tasks... having that time freed up would give us the opportunity to work on new projects that at the moment we’re too busy to do,” she says.

Nia is particularly interested in expanding the face-to-face parts of her role: building templates for customers, and designing and running training courses that she’d deliver herself. This work could be further supported by automation, too: at the moment, bookings for training sessions are done over the phone or by email, picked up by Nia and her team. Automating this system would “really make life a lot easier”, Nia says.

“At the moment it takes a lot of time out of our day – someone asks for a date, we can’t do it, we go back and forth... Often we go back to somebody after that and we don’t get a response.”

“If there was an automated system that showed people what dates were available, we’d get a higher response rate,” she says. “And then I could give more training!”

It’s notable that Nia’s employer has communicated to the team clearly. Nia describes its approach towards communication as “good”, though she puts this partly down to how keen her team is itself to automate part of their roles.

On-the-job training has also been attractive to her employer: Nia will now be able to practice new skills and utilise her own knowledge of the company’s systems to create new solutions. “They’re very keen to get us involved in the process of building and testing [new projects] – that’s the thing they really want us to do. We use these systems every day; it solves a lot of problems for everyone. They’ve been really good at giving us the opportunity to do new things.”

Nia has only one concern about automation – that her changed role will involve a lot more work but with no reflected change in salary. “If people’s jobs are going to change because of automation, there needs to be rules around job spec,” she says. “If you’ve gone from something fairly low level or monotonous, and you end up doing something a bit more interesting and challenging, your pay needs to reflect that and there should be internal processes to support that.”

She believes internal training is the best way for employers to engage their workers around the issue of automation.

Employees should take up offers of training, as well as looking for opportunities and support elsewhere. “I’d also always encourage anyone to join a union, firstly” she says.

“But if you’re worried your job is going to be taken away, you should be thinking: in twelve months times, what are the skills I’m going to need? You might be looking for opportunities in your own work, which is what I find employers tend to respect a little bit more.”

“And look for new work, new opportunities – make sure you’re always one step ahead.”