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! 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.
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, isn’t that interesting?
Although no one can accurately predict what jobs will look like in the future, there are skills that will be essential to your future success.
1. 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.
And remember, in the future, anything is possible.
