Tendencies of future hiring. How will be look life with the process of constantly learning?
I quit my job last week.
Yeah, I quit my job where I was working for above 1 year. A couple of words about my last place of occupation. So, I was an assistant manager in a restaurant in Poland. I liked this job mostly. I met new people, improved my polish skills to fluent speaker, and did a lot of things, that were new for me in this period. Likewise had an OK salary and a good chance to study and learn new skills to get a better job. Then I’ve graduated from the university and got so much free time to live a life I always wanted to. Changing the job is always put some stress on our life, and it could cause different feelings about this situation. Like everyone, who is changing so massive and fundamental things and pieces of the order of our daily life, it was also a bit stressful for me.
But I want to notice, that these feelings about this situation are caused not by accepting the fact of turbulence of life but by facing the future like the time we can not describe at all. I don’t want to be a banal person, who’s talking about the future like the time we can’t impact, but it is. The new chapter of my life started at a moment when I realized, I want to become a person who’s working in a good and healthy environment, with benefits, paid overtime work, and with competitive salary with the possibility to increase my skills. So, I’ve started to look for a new job, that fits me. Today I want to talk about the tendencies of hiring and learning in the future world, and why it is important and will not be similar as it was.
A little remark here, I am writing it at the moment when my home country is at the war now. I’m a Ukrainian who’s living abroad. Glory to Ukraine!
I’ve made this indent not just only to remind you about the situation in the world in 2022, but also to mark that the world changes so fast, and we have to find resources to be in time with it.
Finding the way I want to develop
Like everyone, I’ve started with my CV and thoughts, “What I can do now to get a job?”. I had a clear understanding of the job I wanted to join. My friend (he is an illustrator) told me in 2021 about UI UX design, he said “This is a very popular way to get into the IT sphere, and a lot of designers want to work for the companies to design and develop web pages or mobile apps. It’s a great opportunity to become a part of the future”. It sounded so good, because of the fact, that in a majority of society, people have a construct in their minds that IT developers have good perspectives as well as salaries. And they are right. For now. Why am I saying “for now”?
History repeats itself
So let’s dig deeper into history when the second industrial revolution happened, a big amount of people lost their jobs because of evolving the working processes and building new structures for the daily routine of every worker. To specify the moment which I talk about here’s a real story about the man who’s invited the metal intermodal container in the early 1930th.
It made a huge impact on the world and also during WWII when the US. army used these containers to deliver the ammunition. I don’t want to write a lot about this, I leave links below for the whole story and leave it for your self-educate. That story showed us, and the people of that era, the small and in some minds naive invent could change the delivery business, the storage regulations, and human constructs of work, that were created decades ago. Just normal people who worked in ports were left behind with their education, work experience, and the possibility to feed their families. They had to find a new job and get new skills very fast to normalize their lives. Spoiler: more than 50% of these people didn’t get any job after their abbreviation.
Technologies just put them away, because no one needs to pay 50–100 people daily for the work of unloading and loading ships in ports. Foramens just bought 10 of these containers once, to use them for years. It is just cheaper and faster, it has no problems with alcoholism or work attendance by the personnel, no strikes, and stealing the goods from the port. To be honest, strikes were very popular when the people lost their jobs, but the government solve this problem by gradually decreasing amount of workers the way paining them unemployment allowance for years. It cut the problem of strikes but increased the number of unemployed people on the streets, but that was another story.
How not to become “the port workers” of the 21st century?
The history I’ve told above the port workers is just an example of normal evolving the system of work. I want to mark it — it’s normal when some group of people lost their jobs because of the industrial revolution. I have nothing against the port workers if someone could think about that. They are cool and make a huge impact on our lives daily. Just think about tons of goods you got from China or Bangladesh. Someone delivered this to your country with all safety precautions for storage.
Now we come back to our days. What can we see in the job market right now? If you enter any job portal, you’ll see numerous companies looking for IT specialists and other occupations connected with them. They have the most attractive salary, tons of benefits, and a great environment to raise up and build their own life. This tendency I can see for like 8 years, from the moment I realized very banal and the kid thought, that computers are everywhere. It happened very earlier, probably even until my birth.
As I told you at the begging of my article, I graduated in October 2021 from university. My specialization was film and TV production management. Like most of the people I ever met in my life, I didn’t use my diploma for getting a job. It caused not only my expectations and sorrows about my future occupation but that no one needs that amount of experts in this sphere. And it’s not just a problem only of my specialization, but every student now. The system of study that I had was created a long time ago, the materials were also old and out of date. I’ve just got tons of information that no one needs on the job market for the last 10 years. The university system has a lot of issues, everyone knows that. If you want to learn just a small part about these institutes, here is a video from Jordan Peterson, one of my favorite experts on topics related to the modern system of studying and not only in that.
But here we are facing the question, “How should we study, what should we do to get a good and necessary job?”
The future is now
Here is how I can see the situation. The world moves faster than ever, and 2020, which was a COVID year showed us that not even small either big companies could work remotely and complete the tasks they were doing in non-covid time. So now about the tendencies I could predict for the future hiring system and work at all. The normal and formal system that we have used for years when you go to the university and then, you probably will get a job also for years is just not working now. You can’t become a modern architect without using the tools which we have in 2022, but it is enough for now, just for a couple of years. Human society created a world, of endless improving and evolving our lives to become better. So I want to say, that if is it enough to have some skills in 2022 to get a job, there is no guarantee that someone with very similar abilities in 2030 gets the job you once started. The level of skilled experts, who want to get junior positions constantly increasing, so now we have a problem. When the companies have to reject people with no portfolio even on unpaid internships, where they suppose to learn how to create that level of portfolio they want. It is caused mostly by internet resources, which in major are free and gives people the chance to get the necessary skills. Tons of materials, in any language, format, and topic that you have to learn constantly to be with others. The technologies created a situation where you have to compete with others not only on your first steps at your position but the time you work on it.
I want to talk also about the IT developers, who are working now in big companies. They know at least 2–3 languages of coding, which is an impressive number of information they keep in their minds. Now we can see how no-code developers are appearing. You don’t have to learn coding and math to become an IT specialist. No coding technology gives you the opportunity to create digital products without using no code in development. How it could be real? Yes, it is. You just drag the elements of the interface, writing the basic commands, when the neural network writes the whole clear code with no mistakes and immediately. I wanted to say that, the simplest languages of coding are unnecessary now. They are just old and primitive to create the product on it, and people who knew only that languages of coding lost their jobs very quickly, like workers from the port in the 1930th.
So I could say, that now we are at the begging of a new era, which started in 2020. When only flexible businesses and people could live and raise the standard of their living. Just for the example of that world, I could imagine. When you are 20 you are an engineer of computer systems with a team of 10 developers, when you are 30 you become a team leader with 2 developers, who control the neural network, at 40 you’ll try to run your own company (but, I think the big companies leave no chance for small or mid business) or start a new job with all new skills and technologies of that time.
You will have to learn to the end of your life.
That’s true, but there are no bad things in it. It could be uncomfortable for some reason or for some groups of people. Now, we have Internet that gives you any information at any time you want. As I said before, you can learn and teach almost in every place on the planet, in any language, time, or style. I have to remind also, that this example works in a world where practically everyone uses the Internet only for educational reasons. Which is not always true. Human factors and their impact on the future are very big, but we can predict the tendencies we will probably see in the nearest couple of years.
