Do you remember what life was like before the internet or the iPhones existed? Or can you imagine actually having to look up a word in the dictionary? Probably not, but the truth is your most useful tools didn’t even exist 15 years ago. Yeah, you read it right. Want to know something even crazier?
By 2022, 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 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, there are seven skills that will be essential to your future success.
- 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.
- 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.
- Mental Elasticity and Complex Problem Solving:
The future is going to bring 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 develop able and simply takes practice. The more difficult problems you tackle, the more bendy your brain will get.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 is 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.
- People Skills:
Listen, machines are going to take over eventually and technology is going to get much more advanced, so humans have to stick together. If you want to succeed in the future job market, you’ll have to learn how to manage and work with people and robots, which includes getting in touch with your emotions, having empathy and listening.
Now that you know what skills will make you successful in the future, let’s take a look at some future jobs.
- Waste Management/Trash Engineer
This may be the oddest future job but it’s totally necessary. Humans produce 2.6 billion pounds of trash annually, and what do we do with it? There is no way this practice is sustainable so we have to think about something else to do with all of our rubbish. You could turn our rubbish into clean gas or figure out a way 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.
Average Salary: $25,425 – $87,178
Skills Needed: Strong STEM skills, critical thinking and mental elasticity.
Best Undergraduate Majors: Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Trash Engineering.
- 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? You’ll be an expert in all energy forms 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.
Average Salary: $35,561 – $86,162
Skills Needed: Strong STEM background, mental elasticity and people skills
Best Undergraduate Majors: Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Renewable Energy Engineering, Environmental Studies, Physics, Mechanical Engineering
- Organ/Body Part Creator
Ever heard of the organ black market? Well, it exists, it’s illegal and it’s a huge problem. Why? Because many people around the world spend years on medical waiting lists praying that their name will get called for the next eye, kidney or even heart available. Eventually, they get sick of waiting and they discover the deep, dark world of the organ black market, where they can buy whatever they need for a price.
Every 12 minutes a new name gets added onto the already gigantic waiting list and every day about 21 people die because they didn’t get the organ they needed.
With those kinds of stats, it’s not surprising that people turn to the black market. However, in a few years, it’ll be up to you to create organ and body parts from stem cells and other materials that is not yet known or don’t yet exist.
Average Salary: $34,882 – $130,484
Skills Needed: Strong STEM background, critical thinking, mental elasticity, complex problem solving and creativity
Best Undergraduate Majors: Biology, Genetics, Biomedical Engineering
- Memory Surgeon
Here’s where things start to get a bit sci-fi-y. What if there was a way to surgically remove bad memories, mental illness and destructive behaviour? Is it possible? Would it be ethical? Would it rid the world of terrorism?
Only you can unlock the answers to these burning questions by becoming a Memory Surgeon. Your future career is bound to cause controversy but stick to it and you could change the world. Just make sure you’re only removing memories, illnesses and behaviours that actually need to be removed.
Average Salary: $322,568 to $452,703
Skills Needed: Strong STEM background, critical thinking, mental elasticity, complex problem solving and creativity
Best Undergraduate Majors: Biology, Chemistry, Neurobiology
- Personal Internet of Things (IoT) Security Repair Person
We are used to calling plumbers or repairmen when something is broken around the house, but who do you call when your smart refrigerator gets hacked and tells your smart coffee maker to continuously make coffee and your smart lights to turn on and off every five minutes? A personal IoT Security Repair Person of course. Dis-functioning of products due to hacking is just one of the many problems that the world is bound to face as our devices become smarter.
As an IoT Security Repair Person, you’ll be in charge of thwarting hackers before they cause any damage and fixing any damage that you’re unable to prevent.
Average Salary: $113,670 – $157,197
Skills Needed: STEM, Critical thinking, people skills, mental elasticity, SMAC skills and complex problem solving skills
Best Undergraduate Majors: Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
- Commercial Space Pilot
Elon Musk and Richard Branson are racing to space and soon, civilian space exploration is going to become a reality. 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 then it’s time to start thinking bigger.
Average Salary: $65,140 – $100,700
Skills Needed: STEM, Critical thinking, people skills, creativity, mental elasticity, interdisciplinary skills and complex problem solving skills
Best Undergraduate Majors: Aerospace Engineering, Astrology, Physics, Computer Science
- Personal Productivity Person
In order to compete with the up and coming automated workforce, people have to become as efficient as possible. Think about how many distractions you have in your present life that hinders you from unlocking your full potential: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Netflix, the 24-hour news cycle and more. As technology continues to evolve, the number of distractions we have will continue to grow and if we are inefficient, machines will be looming in the background ready to take our jobs.
Unless, we have Personal Productivity People (PPP). As a PPP, your job will consist of analysing people’s daily lives and teaching them to silence their daily distractions in order to work harder and smarter.
Average Salary: $36,295 – $134,748
Skills Needed: Critical thinking, creativity, people skills, mental elasticity, SMAC skills and interdisciplinary skills
Best Undergraduate Majors: Communication and Media, Physiology, Sociology
So here were few jobs or technologies of future which I could think of but it doesn’t limit only to these. There are many upcoming technologies which are still not known to the world.
Although a lot of the jobs that exist today will be automated in the coming years, we should be excited about the future, not scared of it. The robots will take over all of the boring jobs which will leave more free time for us to explore interesting, creative and important new jobs such as the 7 I outlined in this blog.
However, you shouldn’t limit yourself to the jobs on this list. Dream up your own list of potential future careers that use the essential skills mentioned earlier and who knows, you might create the next million-dollar idea.
Pragna is always involved in development/appreciation of new technology space. Do review the different solutions we are providing to our customers for over the years.
I hope this blog helped you dive into the future. What do you think, what other jobs or technologies would be high in demand in near future? If you could imagine something new apart from what I listed in then do let us know in the comment section below. Also share this blog with all your known ones and help them plan their careers.
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