Is your job future proof? Regarding the future of work, a few trends are worth-noting:
- Future workers will always be in training to adopt to changing job markets. Investing years pursuing a predetermined career path is risky, so students may start working earlier, but they will also likely become life-long learners.
- Slashes or people who dabble in multiple lines of work becomes more common — e.g., you can be a pre-med YouTuber who is passionate about coaching junior-league basketball. Even for those of us who are not multitaskers, over a lifetime, we will probably go through multiple careers, starting off as an aspiring writer, turning into a designer, and ending up to be an entrepreneur, for instance.
- Gig economy will continue to give more employment options to people who want job flexibility as well as people from developing countries, but they will need to fight for job security and benefits. Outsourced digital work such as ghost workers who classify and label data to enable AI through sites like MTurk will need to be properly regulated and compensated.
- Startups in all industries, not only the technology sector, will continue to be a viable choice for people looking for self employment and the rewards of entrepreneurship.
- For a great number of digital workers, working from home (or where the wi-fi is) will be a permanent arrangement rather a temporary state.
- As former US secretary of labor Robert Reich notes, for decades the decline of unionization has coincided with the decrease of middle-class income. While this sad trend is expected to remain in many developed countries, future workers will advocate not only for better pay, benefits and working conditions, but also areas as diverse as leadership inclusion, workplace discrimination and harassment, dress code, tattoo rights, etc..
- For workers who are competitive in the job market, pay and stability will not be their only concerns for a career, but will be considered along with work-life balance, health benefits including childcare, the job’s social impact, shorter work week, and flexibility in hours and location.
- Other workers embrace the anti-work movement, which has been gaining popularity since Covid-19 “exposed deep inequalities; low wages, a lack of paid sick leave, requirements… that left people vulnerable to contracting Covid on the job.” These workers will also organize for better working conditions.
- Workplace surveillance, including keylogging, attention tracking, video surveillance, geolocation tracking, web, email and social media monitoring, will become more commonplace, challenging employee privacy and wellbeing.
- Future workers may be subjected to “algorithmic management”, giving “self‐learning algorithms the responsibility to make and execute decisions affecting workers”. But as the Conversation reports, algorithmic management “carries a host of risks in depersonalising management systems and entrenching pre-existing biases.”
- Massive hacks will continue to threaten vulnerable businesses and organizations. Future workers need to have a security skills to protect themselves and their employers. As security technologist Bruce Schneier suggests, security mindset “…is a valuable skill that everyone can benefit from, regardless of career path.”
- In developed countries, more women than men will graduate from college, but the income gap and leadership gap between men and women is expected to narrow slowly, creating the unfair phenomenon of “women graduate; men lead”. Professional women are especially hard-hit during Covid, quitting jobs en mass to stay home and take care of family. International Labour Organization expects that “[f]ewer women than men will regain employment during the COVID-19 recovery”.
But the biggest, most impactful future trend of work is the possibilities that robots and AI will take over massive amount of human jobs. “A growing body of research suggests artificial intelligence and machines could create at least as many jobs as they displace. One report estimates that while 75 million jobs will be lost globally by 2022, there could be 133 million new ones… We are on a journey to go on finding ways to add automation but it’s about teaching people to be more adaptable in terms of their jobs and their skill sets because the future is about the collaboration between humans and these technologies”, The Economist predicts ▶️. With the rise of AI and expansion of automation, two broad categories of professions will be relatively safe: service-based jobs such as musicians or health professionals because people typically do not wish the “human touch” to be replaced by stone-cold machines, and innovation-based jobs such as engineers and scientists because the AIs and robots running our lives will still need to be created as well as maintained by someone somehow. On the contrary, occupations that are easy to automate such as retailers, drivers, data-centric lawyers, financial analysts have less long-term job security. To see if a robot will take your job, look it up.
Future workers, therefore, need to be adaptive to the automated job market and workplace, developing “Adaptability Quotient”, or the “the capacity to absorb new information… the ability to work out what is relevant, to unlearn obsolete knowledge, overcome challenges, and to make a conscious effort to change. AQ involves flexibility, curiosity, courage, resilience and problem-solving skills too,” says managing director Natalie Fratto. This matches the agile motto of “embracing change” that the software industry uses to remain competitive in ever-changing environments. Learn more in Self > Principle: Growth Mindset.
But even if everyone learns future skills to take on future jobs, it is still possible that AI and automation will replace such a great quantity of human jobs that there will be a surplus of job-seekers compared to demand, or the replacements might devastate certain industries and certain group of people disproportionately, creating greater inequality. “Automation may solve [labor shortages] by increasing productivity and powering growth but creates another by potentially eliminating millions of jobs and suppressing wages for many workers… Technological innovations will give rise to new corporate powerhouses, but at the same time, pervasive insecurity may haunt ordinary families and global enterprises alike,” writer Ben Schiller warns.
That’s why some countries are already debating and experimenting with Universal Basic Income, a governmental public program that gives everyone a basic income to live on even without necessarily having a full time job. This is nothing new — Ancient Rome had a practice called Cura Annonae (“care for the grain supply”) where they handed out free grain and later bread to Rome residents. This sort of basic income was “Roman leadership’s strategy of maintaining tranquility among a restive urban population”. To make this possible in the automation age though, owners of automation will need to be taxed so the wealth generated by the robot’s productivity will be shared with everyone in a society. This will be an uphill battle because the owners of future robots, namely the rich, are notoriously reluctant to share wealth. They will most likely use all their economic and political might to prevent paying any tax. If this happens, massive unemployment, widespread poverty and subsequently large-scale social unrest might be inevitable.
Purpose
Back in the day, school and work impose duties and purposes on us. A country boy sent to the city to learn painting as a trade during medieval time, for example, was at once given duties (to paint) and purpose (be a successful painter in service of patrons to provide for his family). These days, we are given duties but not necessarily purpose. The good news is that we are free to find our own purpose, but the bad news is that we are free to find our own purpose and often don’t know what the heck it is.
Assuming that we start schooling at age 3 and retire at 60 till we die at 80, up to 70% of our years could be spent on learning or working. It would be ideal to study and consequently work on something that we find interesting and fulfilling.
— Or at least that’s an ideal that all post-millennials are sold to. We get anxious for not finding our calling, or worry that we don’t achieve as much as our potential allows. A Berlin guy interviewed by HumansofNY describes this state as: you are free to swim in any direction, but don’t know which (sorry I lost the link). Of course, we don’t necessary have to go to school or work to have a fulfilling life. We can take a break, travel, make friends, volunteer, etc.. (see Life > Life Hacking). Nonetheless, this confusion as well as dissatisfaction with capitalism prompt many modern people to escape from work and live in a life of perpetual suspense.
This trend is especially prominent in young males without a college degree in developed countries. In the U.S., for example, “hours that [these young males] are not working have been replaced almost one for one with leisure time. Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games. The average low-skilled, unemployed man in this group plays video games an average of 12, and sometimes upwards of 30 hours per week,” based on research by economist Erik Hurst.
If you happen to be searching for your callings, try nurturing all of your interests while striving to be an expert in each and every interest by learning systematically from masters and putting in a ton of deliberate practice. Overtime, passing interests fade away and serious passions become really enjoyable and creative. With any luck, you can use your new mastery to hone a fulfilling and rewarding profession.
When you do, don’t forget to give back. As Toni Morrison tells her students: “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.
Life after work
Lastly, let’s have a word about life after work. Author Neil Pascricha thinks we can all learn from Okinawa Centenarians, who don’t retire and do nothing, but do something they love. Pascricha summarizes how these elderlies achieve that in 4S’s:
- Social: Friends, peers, and coworkers who brighten our days and fulfill our social needs.
- Structure: The alarm clock ringing because you have a reason to get up in the morning, and the resulting satisfaction you get from earned time off.
- Stimulation: Keeping our minds challenged by learning something new each day.
- Story: Being part of something bigger than ourselves by joining a group whose high-level purpose is something you couldn’t accomplish on your own.
Read about other relationships in the 21st century:
- Self
- Romance / Sex
- Family
- Friends
- School
- Communities
- Social status
- Consumer groups / Economies
- Political Systems
- Memes / Ideologies / Religions
- Humanity
- Environment / World
- Universe / Beyond Our Universe
Do you have any suggestions, doubts, hypothesis or experience for this topic? Please comment below 👇!
