A totally new area of opportunity is developing around internet business but does it offer additional jobs or replace others in a more traditional setting? Reports continue to circulate about the growth in the Online Jobs market and how it will have a positive impact on the number of people without a job in the UK over the next couple of years. On the face of it this would seem to be true.

Organisations are popping up at a great rate taking advantage of the huge demand in online shopping from individual things for personal use such as gifts, household appliances, fashion and books to the business to business type trade where larger scale trading takes place. We can also see the growth of existing organizations who have realised the online opportunities and have expanded their offering, moving into online sales and therefore widening their audience enormously. Both of these circumstances will mean an rise in employee numbers whether they Work From Home or in the office or factory.

Certainly in the short term this will cut down the jobless figures as existing roles are maintained and people are recruited into the new positions created and developed by the organisation from this exciting new source. On top of the sales processing or customer service roles there will also be increases in back room roles such as personnel, finance departments and of course in manufacturing areas. As demand on each particular company increases due to their successful internet marketing virtually all areas of the organization will need to expand. The company will also need to handle larger distribution, banking and accountancy requirements meaning that there will be increased demand on outside organizations servicing the growing company.

However at some point, potentially after the euphoria brought on by the remarkable increase in sales has faded, the business will need to reevaluate all of it’s sectors. It may be that this takes a while to come about, however in the most astute companies they may already be anticipating falls in other sales areas. The organisation may at that point see that areas such as high street sales have been negatively affected by the move towards internet marketing and it may be decided that it is no longer worth being active in those areas.

So eventually we could see simply a shift in the sales arena, from the more conventional kinds such as high street shops and catalogue chains to the newer and more successful Internet Business. Jobs will go in the old sectors as high street shop profits drop off and organizations see a much better return on investment from their e-commerce activities. The workforce in these shrinking markets will reduce and we could end up with a jobless statistic that is larger than the existing one.

Of course, it’s not at all certain that there will be a rise in job seekers as a result of these trends. History from the dawn of the industrial revolution teaches us that these types of efficiencies make society as a whole richer over time. A percentage of the workers losing their jobs will set up new micro businesses, and taking advantage of the changes which caused their owners to lose their jobs in the first place, enough of these firms will grow into significant employers in their own right. Thereby employing those whose jobs were lost at the start of the trend.