I was born in the late 1980s and digitalization has developed a lot during my life. During the first years of my life, the development was steady, and in childhood and adolescence, the development was visible in my own life mainly with the help of game consoles, computers and mobile phones. In recent years, digital development has been enormous, and today we are already talking about using artificial intelligence (AI) at work and robots as coworkers. Work has also changed during my own working career with this development, and there is no end in sight for this development and change.
I started working in my current position in payroll administration in 2017. Since then the tasks have changed a lot and big steps have been taken, for example, towards a safer world in the processing of personal data. The GDPR regulation what was applied from 2018 is very good, but on this side of the table it has also brought its own challenges. As an employer, we have an obligation to archive certain personal data about employees for ten years. At the same time, some of the personal data must be deleted from the systems as soon as the employment relationship ends, which mean that also the requirements for HR systems is different today than just a few years ago. Personal data must be easily deleted and, on the other hand, we must be able to get easily a listing of the customer’s all personal data that found in ours systems. Also employees medical certificates and their archiving have bring their own challenges. Today, payroll and HR systems already offer many solutions for safe storage of personal data and, on the other hand, also for deletion, but there is still a lot work to do in that area.
In the future, my own work will constantly change with the new ways of working brought about by digitalization. Al can already replace a large part of the basic salary work, but the information produced by Al still needs to be checked by a human. I believe that in the coming years, especially reporting and certain analytics will move more and more from my own work to the data produced by Al.
With the increase in electronic filing possibilities and electronic signatures, various contract processes have also developed a lot in recent years. The next step here is possibly some system that makes contract templates into written form based on spoken conversation. Year by year, the work of payroll is increasingly connected to HR work, where the most important thing is to help in problem situations concerning the person and to interpret collective agreements. On the other hand, in the wildest images of the future, even this interpretation of collective agreements may be completely transferred to Al, but we will have to wait and see what the future brings in this field…
I have used Chat GPT to some extent in my work. I mainly use it to write various instructions and listings. For example, a question: tell me about good leadership.
I could get the same answers from Google through different pages, but Chat GPT retrieves this information for me at the header level easily from different sources into one answer. In my opinion, Chat GPT does not exceed this general level, but it gives the good points that you can learn more about using other sources. Chat GPT’s answers are also always on a general level, and you can’t ask or get answers for the needs of a specific company.
The course material and other students blogs reminded me how many opportunities digitalization has created for us and how many different ways it can be used in working life nowadays. At the same time I constantly feel a little worried about how much I self process people’s personal data in my own work. In future I will pay even more attention to their processing and deletion. E-mail sometimes seems to remain an archiving place for me, and the course reminded me again how bad e-mail is for storing people’s personal information. I also believe that there is always something to learn in digitization on a personal level and we all must pay attention to the protection and safe use of our own devices.
I read Niina’s (https://blogi.savonia.fi/nbast/digi-society-for-the-digi-society-assignments/)
and Outi’s (https://blogi.savonia.fi/outiihalainen/digi-society/) blogs and commented on them.
Hi Jenni!
I got excited to read many students’ blogs, because it was interesting to know how data protection and security issues are reflected in different workplaces and tasks. I decided to comment on your blog since your work is so different from mine. I work at Perheentalo, which is a meeting place for families with children. Discussion and service guidance. In my own work, these data protection issues have only become the most important issues in recent years. This is due to changes in my job description. There is a lot to learn – now and in the future.
You said very well the idea that I was thinking about Chat GPT. Its answers really come at a general level, and cannot be requested by any specific company. This makes it possible to use it at the title level, parsing the question.