Skills Needed to Land Jobs of the Future
Do you remember what life was like before iPhones existed?
What about before Uber?
The internet?
Can you imagine actually having to look up a word in the dictionary?
Or going to the library to rent the latest edition of Harry Potter?
Probably not.
The majority of your life has been inundated with technology but the truth is, your most useful tools didn’t even exist 15 years ago!
Yeah, you heard me right.
iPhones didn’t exist 15 years ago.
Want to know something even crazier?
By 2025, we’ll lose over five million jobs to automation.
That means that future jobs will look vastly different by the time you graduate university.
Don’t worry, though! The jobs of the future will actually be more interesting than those of the past.
Gone are the days of factory workers and physical production... we’ll let the machines handle that.
Instead, future jobs will involve knowledge creation and innovation. Machines are actually doing you a favour.
They’re freeing you up to explore, experiment and find interesting solutions to complex problems, like pollution.
Say goodbye to a desk job and hello to the world of creation!
Future Skills
Although no one can accurately predict what jobs will look like in the future (which won’t stop me from trying!), there are seven skills that will be essential to your future success.
1. Mental Elasticity and Complex Problem Solving:
The future is going to bring about problems you've never seen before in a world you’ve never experienced. In order to solve these problems, you’ll need to have the mental flexibility to think outside of the box, see the big picture and rearrange things to find a solution. Luckily, this skill is highly developable and simply takes practice. The more difficult problems you tackle, the more bendy your brain will get!
2. Critical Thinking:
Technology may be able to automate many of the jobs that currently exist, but you probably wouldn't trust it to do your critical thinking for you; as such your future career will require you to have excellent critical thinking skills. You’ll constantly need to be analysing various situations, considering multiple solutions and making decisions on the fly through logic and reasoning.
3. Creativity:
Worried about robots stealing your job? The more creative you are, the less likely you are to lose your job to a robot! While robots may be better than you at calculating and diagnosing problems, they aren’t very good at creating original content, thinking outside the box or being abstract, yet.
4. People Skills:
Listen, machines are going to take over eventually and technology is going to get much more advanced, so us humans have to stick together! If you want to succeed in the future job market, you’ll need to learn how to manage and work with people (and robots), which includes getting in touch with your emotions, having empathy and listening,
5. STEM:
Even though science, technology, engineering and maths jobs are super hot right now, don’t expect them to go away in the future. As technology progresses, you’ll need to have more advanced STEM skills to keep up. Also coding. Learn how to code.
6. SMAC:
You’ve heard of STEM but you probably haven’t heard of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud). Catchy, right? Learning all of these skills/platforms will make you stand out in the future job market!
7. Interdisciplinary Knowledge:
Your future career will require you to pull information from many different fields to come up with creative solutions to future problems. This skill’s easy to work on as well. Start by reading as much as you can about anything and everything that interests you. Once you get to college, consider double majoring or minoring in completely different fields. Trust me, it’ll pay off in the long run.
Jobs of the Future
Now that you know what skills will make you successful in the future, let’s take a look at some future jobs!
Disclaimer: All of these jobs do not currently exist and may never exist so please don’t blame me if you tell your parents that you want to be a trash engineer and they laugh in your face.
Trash Engineer
This may be the oddest future job but it’s totally necessary!
Think about it.
Humans produce 2.6 billion pounds of trash annually, and what do we do with it?
Throw it in landfill.
There is no way this practice is sustainable so we’re going to have to think about something else to do with all of our rubbish.
Unfortunately, just packing our trash Wall-E style isn’t going to cut it.
In comes future you!
A world renowned trash engineer who’s solving the earth’s waste problems one wrapper at a time.
You could turn our rubbish into clean gas! Or figure out a way to make it combine to make it strong enough to construct buildings with!
The possibilities are endless but it’s up to you to come up with the award winning ideas.
Skills Needed: Strong STEM skills, critical thinking and mental elasticity.
Alternative Energy Consultant
People cannot survive on fossil fuel forever, so alternative energy sources are the only hope.
I’m sure you’ve heard of solar, wind and hydroelectric energy. The question is, which one is right for your home, your community and your city?
Say hello to your new dream job: Alternative Energy Consultant.
You’ll be an expert in all things energy and go from city to city around the world assessing the best sustainable energy source for each place.
Believe me, you’ll be in high demand very soon!
Skills Needed: Strong STEM background, mental elasticity and people skills
Earthquake Forecaster
This job is literally impossible in today’s day and age, but hey, some people would have said the same thing about weather forecasters less than a hundred years ago!
With big earthquakes happening more frequently, someone’s going to have to come up with a way to accurately map the Earth’s core and figure out how to actually predict earthquakes with plenty of warning.
My money’s on you!
Skills Needed: Strong STEM background, critical thinking, and complex problem solving skills
Commercial Space Pilot
Elon Musk and Richard Branson are racing to space and soon, civilian space exploration is going to become a reality.
Yay!
However, there’s one little problem… who’s going to fly us around?
We can’t possibly all become astronauts before exploring the moon (or Mars); that would take way too long and wouldn’t be practical at all.
We’ll need someone who has the experience of an astronaut but is also trained to handle much larger rockets with many more people aboard.
Sounds like a tough job but if you’re an expert on space and have always dreamed of becoming an astronaut, it’s time to start thinking bigger!
I’m counting on you to become the best Commercial Space Pilot the future has ever seen!
Skills Needed: STEM, Critical thinking, people skills, creativity, mental elasticity, interdisciplinary skills and complex problem solving skills
Crimson Education Na’ama Landu
