Why you should learn automation, even if you never code
By: Sandy Sanjaya
Tags: Startup, Personal Development, Innovation, Data Science, Programming

Regardless of where you work, there is one thing in common. Monotonous and menial work will always be a part of the job. This job can range from reporting to authority, editing photos for your e-commerce products, searching longitude/latitude in google maps, data collection, and formatting. The annoying part of this job is not the difficulty of the task. Still, an obnoxious amount of time is wasted on this job. It could take hours or even days to finish the job, only to do the same next week/month. It makes work more tiring, and questions the value of your effort in your work.

This article is to elaborate on why automation is an essential skill for you to learn and its benefit for the rest of us who do not divulge into coding. It is not to train you in the field of automation, understanding there are already tons of articles and stories to explore the topic. If you are looking for such stories, you can reference “Towards Data Science” publication for more detailed reports or visit Automate The Boring Stuff. For the sake of this story, automation would be defined as any process that could decrease manual labor. The automation article talks specifically about automation that can be performed on a computer without any other equipment.

1. Automation saves time.

Let’s start with the most obvious one, creating automation saves a lot of time. It is one of those times that you invest a lot at the beginning and can bear a lot of fruit later on. Most of these works are a burden that we need to fulfill periodically, and literally waste hours or days working on. In the absence of automation, workers need to edit pictures to put on frames for each product in an e-commerce site or fill out hundreds of forms for transactions. Though it might seem easy, doing this repetitive work is exhausting and time-consuming.

Why is this important?

Creating automation allows you to do repetitive tasks in a significantly less amount of time. Things like editing for hours can be done in seconds. This substantially increases your productivity and gives you a lot more time to chill or work on another project. This is important because living in a capitalistic society (corporate or start-ups) to move up or get promoted is always about proving yourself. It is still good to have ammunition when you are asking for promotions. To increase your chances, we frequently need to do the task of higher-ups before getting the benefits. This is why companies often glorify hard work because they want to see proof. Promotion means more risk for the company. It means giving new responsibility to new workers. Obtaining a new time allows you more chances to prove merit outside your job descriptions. Getting more time means seizing more opportunities for you to develop.

2. It is terrible for your mental health.

Working in multiple industries has taught me that I never hated my job, I hated doing the monotonous work. Bojack puts it the best by saying,

“Every day, it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day — that’s the hard part.” -Bojack

Though it might be in a different context, it speaks to the rest of us who continuously cannot escape the monotonous workflow. Our minds are left unchallenged, and we felt unproductive yet tired of doing jobs that we know will never be over. A Harvard Business Review post an article on “If You’re Burning Out, Carve a New Path,” which portrays that monotonous work can negatively impact mental health, cause us significant stress, and lead to burnout. It is essential to find meaning in our work, but it’s hard while we always felt like a cog in a machine only to work until we are tired.

What automation can do is to decrease the burden of monotonous work. However, you might be required to supervise the code to run, but it gives you power and agency to yourself by giving you more time to do stuff that you like. You do not feel suffocated by the monotonous work, but feel proud that you can contribute in that saves up a substantial amount of time to your company. Though it might seem menial, it is crucial to explore meaning in your work that is not just tokenistic.

We all want to have the power to say we are more than just a cog

3. Automation decrease human errors

The most annoying part of working is to clean up your/other people’s mess. Unfortunately, these mistakes will exist due to human error. Either we are exhausted, a slip of the hand, or maybe pure ignorance often results in crisis management that is continuously and mentally draining. Intentional or not, human error is a danger all companies need to prevent.

Automation allows you to use tools that you are familiar with, like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. It integrates that with Python Code to simulate human behaviours. This means no more typos, unintentional clicks, miscalculations, or missing one form. Understanding that works in corporate and start-ups would always be integrated and heavily influenced by human errors would frequently stop other teams. Reparation to this would need to go back and forth and often impossible when it is already delivered later on. The continuous damage of human error will persist when we continuously depend on humans.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

4. It helps your company develop.

The truth about monotonous jobs is it is only going to get worse over time. The tedious workload usually gets more prominent when the business grows. Take an example from a reporting scheme for a financial start-up to the government. The more transactions it carries on its system would mean more forms an employee needs to fill and send to the government. Without the use of automation, companies end up hiring people for monotonous jobs without any career plan or outsourcing to other companies. Companies need to prevent this harm before it starts getting too big until it disrupts businesses.

How can automation help? Automation can be used to minimize these workloads and cut down prices that you might use to employ or outsource. With current progress in automation, it can handle large volumes of data without trouble. That means you do not have to invest more even if your businesses grow.

In addition to that, becoming the person who can automate and improve productivity would be a significant boost to your career. You actively provide a more substantial contribution to your company, and that puts you ahead miles in the competition.

Photo by LYCS Architecture on Unsplash

5. Automation framework is a transferable skill

Understanding monotonous work exists everywhere, which means job opportunities for automation will be there. Unless the job is saturated at one point, which is a bit unlikely happening shortly. Transferable skills are essential to have in life. Most of us graduated in the economic or healthcare crisis, and can never depend on one industry to strive. Our decision in the past to choose our major might change. We might not like our sector or environment. In a world where we always glorify passion, we forget that it is a product of externalities. We picked specific majors because it was cool or others think its profitable. We are forced to choose the 60 years of our lives when we were 20. There are times where we want our lives to change. Having skills like automation serves as a safety net when the worst comes knocking on our door.