Undercover Parent: Jobs in the Brave New World

As parents we all want our children to be happy, although most of us would admit to a link between happiness and paid employment. What jobs, therefore, should we suggest to our teenage children for consideration? The undercover parent has been doing a bit of sleuthing...

Complete University Guide says the current top ten degrees for full-time professional employment six months after university ends are:

• Dentistry (94%)
• Nursing (94%)
• Medicine (93%)
• Physiotherapy (91%)
• Veterinary Medicine (91%)
• Medical Technology (90%)
• Occupational Therapy (86%)
• Optometry, Ophthamology and Orthoptics (85%)
• Land and Property Management (80%)
• Building (79%)

Salaries, prospects and required skills for these and many other occupations can be checked out on www.prospects.ac.uk .

However, the future is inherently difficult to predict. Current advice seems to be to foster agility and diversification. This means, expect a portfolio of work, rather than a single career to last a lifetime.

Increased automation is also a major factor to consider. McKinsey & Co management consultants, warn that half of today’s jobs could be automated by 2055, and the Bank of England suggests that 15 million UK jobs could disappear or be re-engineered through automation.

Martin Ford, futurist and author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future , suggests jobs, resilient to automation, can be split into three main groups:

• Those requiring genuine creativity (such as artists, scientists, developing new business strategies)
• Occupations that involve building complex relationships with people (such as nursing, business, religious or spiritual advisers)
• Highly unpredictable jobs (such as an emergency plumber).

Tom Davenport, author of Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines (these books do have rather scary titles) has some strategies to suggest. One is to find work in the field of monitoring what computers do and deciding what to automate next. Another is to focus on areas that are hard to automate. Many new jobs depend on programming ability, but not all. Examples of “new” jobs include Body Part Maker, Nano-Medic or Avatar Manager as well as Climate Controller, Waste Data Handler and Digital Architect.

So maybe the advice to our kids should be “do something you love and are really good at"... and that may be something we adults don’t even think of as a proper job.

Meanwhile, have fun checking your job risk of automation on www.willrobotstakemyjob.com