So to this day, whenever students ask me about how to get their first job, I always tell them, “Get your foot in the door of whatever company you would like to work for. Either that, or be the founder of your own company. If you want to work for an existing company, just get a job inside the building. Any job you can get, the closest to what you want to do. If you have the credentials and are motivated, and if you are already inside the building, sooner or later there will be an opening in a position that you will be interested in.” But the key condition in either case—whether you get into an existing company or start one of your own—is that you have to have found something you’re passionate about. In my case, I never would have been able to work the graveyard shift as a translator for several years if I didn’t have a passion for and a dream of working as a journalist.
But what if you are a young person without a clearly defined passion? In that case, I recommend you take a look at the following list of occupations where we are likely to see the greatest job opportunities in the near future. It’s not exhaustive by any means—we don’t know what new jobs will arise from future technologies—but it summarizes the predictions made by many futurologists I interviewed for this book. In the long term, past 2030, many of the new frontiers in the world of work will be in the field of space exploration—will we be gardeners on Mars?—and genetic engineering. But in the short term, in the 2020s, most of the jobs are likely to be within the following ten fields:
1. Health care assistants: The increase in life expectancy and an aging world population will require increasingly more health-related professionals, including physicians, nurses, psychologists, nutritionists, massage therapists, physical trainers, and counselors. There will also be several new kinds of health workers with interdisciplinary skills, such as robotic medicine specialists, who will be in charge of handling the robotic surgeons in operating rooms; medical engineers, who will, among other things, use 3-D printers to create new skin from the cells of patients undergoing reconstructive surgeries; and genetic engineering specialists, who will help create personalized medications tailored to each individual patient.
And among health care workers in general, those who work with the elderly will be in highest demand. Between 2014 and 2030, the world’s population aged sixty-five and over will increase by 300 million. And these people need the help, empathy, and human warmth that robots and algorithms won’t be able to offer for quite some time. In countries like China, Germany, Italy, and Japan, roughly 25 percent of the population will be sixty-five years of age or older by 2030. While the elderly in Japan already have robotic pets that can be caressed and simulate joy by moving their tails, they won’t replace—at least in the foreseeable future—the human touch of health care workers who can look someone in the eye, hold their hand, and convey a sense of affection.
Health care workers will also be needed to fight an epidemic of loneliness. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Theresa May appointed in 2018 a minister for loneliness to address the needs of the estimated 9 million British citizens living solitary lives. This represents about 14 percent of the population, though in some sectors, like the elderly, the figure goes above 33 percent. According to Sir Simon McDonald, the head of the British Diplomatic Service, one of the primary reasons for the creation of this new position was to help save on government health expenses through social activities that give a sense of purpose to elderly people’s lives. “Loneliness destroys lives, and it costs the public treasury an enormous amount of money” in health expenditures, McDonald told me. The parliamentary commission that recommended the creation of this new agency had stated that loneliness can be more damaging to people’s health than obesity and even smoking.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the most common jobs of the future will be that of “people walkers.” I’m not kidding. The Center for the Future of Work, the research wing of the tech firm Cognizant, ranks “walker/talkers” among the nearly two dozen jobs that will be needed most in the upcoming decade. The study, titled “The 21 Jobs of the Future,” says that with the increase in longevity and oncoming technological unemployment, walker/talkers will be employed both by government agencies and by the elderly and their families.
There will be numerous websites offering companionship for elderly people who find themselves alone. Just as Uber puts drivers in touch with people who need a ride, these websites will allow the elderly to hire a walker or a conversational companion at an hourly rate to spend time together and chat. “Academic research has demonstrated that engaged and energized seniors are twice as healthy as those who spend most of their time alone; health cost savings generated by our services more than pay for themselves,” the center’s study says.
To provide this service to the elderly, people will have to pass a rigorous background check. For many people, it will be an ideal job. Like Uber drivers, they will be able to choose their working hours and decide which jobs to accept or reject. And thanks to these online platforms, they will be free to choose which clients to work for. Any professional walker/talker who receives a request will be able to see who else has spent time with the potential client, and what rating the customer received, before accepting an assignment. Also available online will be what topics of conversation the customer recently enjoyed, so that any new walker/talker can pick up the dialogue where a previous colleague left off.
Does that sound crazy? No crazier than it would have sounded if someone had told you a few decades ago that there would be dog walkers or personal nutritionists. Plus, there’s no reason why the elderly should spend their golden years like many do now, crammed into overcrowded nursing homes where a handful of caregivers must look after large numbers of older people. Paying individual attention to the elderly—whether through home visits, hour-long walks, or virtual conversations—will be one of the jobs that will be most in demand.
2. Data analysts, data engineers, and programmers: Data will be the most valuable commodity in coming years—the oil of the twenty-first century—and there will be plenty of jobs for those exploring and analyzing digital information. Already, all sorts of industries—from banks to stores—are recruiting as many data analysts and engineers as they can to identify potential new customers and keep their current ones. According to some estimates, the growth of the middle class in China, India, and other emerging countries will result in an increase of a billion consumers across the world by 2025. That will mean a lot of work for data analysts.
Restaurants will need a data manager to create client profiles with the birthdays and favorite dishes of their customers. Movie production companies—big and small—will be hiring data analysts to explore social media and identify potential new viewers or to look to see what people thought of a particular movie so they can offer similar films. Most businesses will also employ data analysts to track our social media habits and find out exactly what time of day we are likely to be on Facebook or Twitter, in order to send us personalized advertising at just the right moment.
This sort of data work used to be done by well-paid engineers or scientists with master’s degrees or Ph.D.s. But with the growing use of data mining platforms like Tableau.com or Domo.com, more people with basic computer skills will be able to do this sort of job for all types of companies. Many of these analysts will be digital detectives who will try to identify trends and rumors in social media. If reports are popping up on Facebook and Twitter about people getting sick from eating tomatoes, data analysts working for supermarkets will immediately send an alert to their bosses, perhaps recommending to avoid using the color red in their ads for the next six months. Data managers will become—and in some cases, already are—top advisers to CEOs.
3. Digital security guards: As the economy moves further into the digital world, there will be even more of a need for companies to protect themselves from cyber attacks. Just as most office buildings have an armed guard at their door, companies will also need a digital secu
rity guard—or many—to make sure that their data are not stolen by some mischievous teenager in America, a professional spying group in Russia, or the government of North Korea. According to U.S. officials, China has a special military agency, known as PLA Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army, specifically to hack into foreign governments and companies.
Cyber pirates are getting ever more ambitious. Emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign—which the CIA, the FBI, and the National Intelligence Agency attributed to people with ties to the Russian government who later passed the data along to WikiLeaks—destabilized elections in the most powerful nation on earth and helped elect Donald Trump. The 2013 hacking of Yahoo, which didn’t become known until three years later, put the personal data of more than a billion people at risk. The 2017 cyber attack on Equifax, one of the three largest U.S. credit reporting agencies, resulted in personal information of 143 million Americans being stolen. Not even Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, has been safe from hacking. In 2012, a group of cyber pirates connected to the Iranian government introduced a virus into the company’s servers that affected 30,000 computers and temporarily paralyzed its operations.
Global cybersecurity expenses—or investments, if you prefer—are expected to double from $3 trillion in 2016 to $6 trillion by 2021, and jobs in this field will more than triple from 1 million to 3.5 million over the same period, one study says. As the world becomes increasingly dependent on the Internet—the global online population doubled from 2 billion individuals in 2015 to 3.8 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach 6 billion by 2022—there will be more cybercrimes and a greater need for cyber police.
4. Sales consultants: Thanks to increased productivity and the growth of the middle class worldwide, global consumption will increase by more than $23 trillion. And as an increasing number of physical stores are replaced by e-commerce, growing numbers of specialists will be needed to advise the public about the pros and cons of all kinds of products. Sales consultants will replace what we now call salespeople, and will become known as specialists or geniuses, as customer service reps are already known at Apple stores. They will have to have a stronger academic background and better communication skills than many current salespeople. Instead of pushing sales as fast as they can, they will be expected to educate consumers and build trusted relationships in order to earn long-term client loyalty. If they don’t have what you need, they may refer you to a competitor. One of their primary job requirements will be to have a contagious smile and to radiate good vibes, something that humans will continue to do much better than robots for quite some time.
5. Robot maintenance technicians and programmers: Worldwide sales of industrial robots are expected to increase fivefold, from the 253,000 units sold in 2015 to nearly 1.3 million units in 2025, which will require many more mechanics and engineers to provide them with technical support. Robotic engineers will be needed to keep the robots oiled up and running, and programmers will have to constantly update the robots’ software.
Virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Home will need programmers to help them answer increasingly more sophisticated questions. Also, self-driving cars will need humans to oversee algorithm reactions to unforeseen factors and exceptions to the rules, such as when there is a detour sign on the road that autonomous cars’ sensors may not be able to detect because of bad weather.
In addition, there will be a need for human designers and inspectors of the Internet of Things, the system through which all kinds of objects will be connected with one another. Thanks to the Internet of Things, the sensor on a milk carton will notify our refrigerator that it’s running low on milk; the fridge will then send a message to the supermarket ordering a replacement, which in turn will communicate with a taxi service that will deliver the product to our home—all of that without any human intervention. This phenomenon will require people who can monitor and maintain the millions of sensors that will be everywhere and on everything.
Cities across the world are already installing sensors in their water and gas pipes to alert them about leaks, helping them avoid accidents and reducing waste. With self-driving cars, there will be more sensors at bridges and tunnels to warn vehicles about potential dangers. The city of Barcelona already has an energy-saving system of public lighting that turns on only when a car or pedestrian approaches, instead of having the lights on all night.
A world in which all things are digitally interconnected means people will be needed to install sensors, maintain them, integrate them, and inspect them to make sure there are no flaws that could lead to chaotic or even dangerous situations. Just as good airplane maintenance can be a matter of life and death today, maintaining urban infrastructure sensors will be critical in the future. Nobody will want to risk having a broken sensor on a highway send the wrong signal to self-driving cars and steer them off a cliff.
6. Teachers and professors: With the growing automation of jobs, we will need more teachers and professors to instruct people on how to run and maintain robots, how to work with them, and how to perform the sophisticated tasks that intelligent machines won’t be able to perform. There will be two types of jobs: those in which robots will supervise humans, and those in which humans will supervise robots. The latter will require better education and will pay better salaries. The current education system whereby young people study a subject and then apply what they have learned in school for the rest of their lives has become obsolete. What we majored in in college ten, twenty, or thirty years ago is prehistoric as far as today’s jobs are concerned. As we move forward, we’ll have to study throughout our lives, reinventing ourselves from time to time, depending on the demands of the labor market. Those who don’t keep learning for life or don’t have an exceptional skill will be left in the dust.
Granted, robots like Professor Einstein will replace some educators, but there will be a greater need for elementary and preschool teachers to help children find their areas of interest and teach them soft skills such as ethics, empathy, teamwork, persistence, and a tolerance for failure. University professors will also be needed to meet the lifelong educational needs of hundreds of millions of people. Robots and tablets will eventually take over the role of transmitting information to students, but they won’t be as effective as humans in developing young people’s sense of curiosity and helping them find their passions, and in keeping adults constantly updated and motivated.
7. Alternative energy specialists: The growing threat of natural disasters caused by climate change and the lower costs of clean energy will give rise to dozens of new green energy–related careers. There will be a need for more scientists specializing in renewable energies, such as those using solar panels or wind turbines, and more architects and engineers who can design energy-efficient plants, buildings, and vehicles, or can convert existing ones into greener ones. The U.S. International Energy Agency estimates that between 2015 and 2030, global investments in clean-energy factories and projects to reduce greenhouse gases will reach $16.5 trillion.
And while Trump’s 2017 decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change could delay some investments in clean energy, his unfortunate decision may not succeed in keeping America from meeting the Paris Agreement’s goals. Key state and local U.S. governments are vowing to abide by the Paris Agreement’s targets, whether Trump likes it or not. As former U.S. vice president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore told me in an interview, “In California, New York, Washington, and many other states, and in many cities, they have made a commitment to do what Trump has refused to do. And many of these states and local governments have the tools available to them to start reducing emissions.” Some cities such as Georgetown, Texas, have already decided to rely 100 percent on renewable energy, he added. China has already announced big investments in alternative energy, and India has set a goal for itself of getting 40 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2030
. With or without Trump, global investments in clean energy will continue to grow, and that will mean millions of new jobs for workers to fill.
8. Artists, athletes, and other entertainers: As more people work flexible hours, have temporary jobs, or spend fewer hours a week on their jobs, there will be more leisure time. This will mean a greater need for workers in creative industries like moviemaking, music, art, and literature. The shrinking workweek, which we’re already seeing in countries like the Netherlands, will create a greater demand for content to entertain the population. The increase in the number of television series produced by Netflix, HBO, and Amazon is already proof of this phenomenon. And the same thing will happen with sports. There will be an explosion of local and school sports leagues, and their games will be broadcast live to our smartphones. With more free time, we will have a greater desire to spend it the best way we can, and that will increase the demand for more and better entertainment.
9. Product designers and creators of commercial content: As e-commerce grows, and as more consumers make their choices based on what they see online, companies will need more people to create virtual content—including web designers, bloggers, social media writers, and virtual reality artists—to promote their products. As pointed out in chapter 3, restaurants will be hiring their own designers, writers, artists, and videographers to promote their menus. They will tell the story of each plate and will give us a detailed analysis of its nutritional benefits. Companies, athletes, and artists alike will increasingly rely on their own designers and content creators to reach their audiences. In the auto industry, for instance, most potential buyers used to go to a dealership to check out a car, whereas now they can preview everything online or with augmented reality goggles and go to the showroom only to confirm their decision. Websites and augmented reality showrooms will be more important than salesroom floors, which will create a need for ever more talented content creators.
The Robots Are Coming! Page 36