When I decided my career path 30 years ago, I’d say my first choice was influenced by the admonition, “Follow your passion”. I loved numbers. So, at 17, I thought accounting was something I should consider.
It was my mother who suggested a teaching degree. She said no matter how many cuts are made, people will always need to be educated — from kindy to PhDs. Her reasoning — affected by the country’s financial crisis at that time — made me ask myself if I was attracted to my choice because of its promise of prosperity or because it stirred me on a deeper level?
Neither inherently right nor wrong, she continued, but I must put my decisions in real-world context and determine if expectations matched reality.
But, that was the time when “Apple” was just a fruit and “digital” was a fairly unimportant word.
At the Adobe Education Leaders Seminar I attended recently, a new report revealed that preparing students with digital skills as part of the learning process is most critical.
Of 1,398 respondents, 80 per cent of the educators felt that effective use of digital and mobile platforms will personalise and enrich the learning experience. As experts identify which jobs will survive technological change, digital literacy will be as valuable as academic achievement. Technology is unlikely to fade in importance, only because the skills required will be brought to the fore in all sectors.
Many jobs being filled at the moment did not exist 20 years ago. Over the next 10 to 15 years, some jobs face a high probability of being replaced by computers, which means some people will be out of jobs. At the same time, new jobs will be created.
The advent of the digital era has signalled a decade of significant change. More change lies ahead. Educational institutions and workplaces are slowly attempting to adapt to a digital future.
Nothing is more important now than working on the right education policies, and social and economic infrastructure, while companies need to understand how to achieve organisational change and equip their staff with skills for the future.
The future will not be about people competing with machines, it will be about people using machines. The challenge is to make the transition as smooth, painless and planned as we can. The goal is to forecast and recognise the skills and jobs you’ll have in the future and the way the jobs will change.
So, what can Gen Y, and the younger generation, do now to make sure they have a job in the future?
It goes without saying that it is all about developing skills in the technology areas. Information Technology (IT) professionals, like programmers, security specialists and administrators, will continue to be in high demand.
Think along this way: the rise in online spending, the roll-out of faster broadband and expansions in systems, software, cloud computing, big data analytics, social technologies and IT security that could go some way to tackle the unemployment rate.
In one session, it was mentioned that increased competition and the desire of companies to find new ways of differentiating their products and services will ensure that marketing professionals are kept in high demand in the digital wave of change. Trends and strategies change over time, those who can demonstrate that they are keeping up with strategy, will be better positioned.
As marketing becomes more education-based, content creation has a demand and will not be eliminated. Individuals in this field still need to have good communication and writing skills, and be highly creative and original. Keeping up requires an upskilling of the right digital creative tools.
But not everybody needs to be a techy, there are areas where social interaction skills and emotional intelligence will become increasingly important, and that includes service industries, particularly education and healthcare.
An ageing population will not only put doctors and nurses in more demand but many jobs relating to geriatric care and human services. Empathy, insight, intuition — it’s impossible for technology to do those well. Educators and parents should assist young people to make the right choices about what course to do with the rising cost of a university education, and that graduate job prospects and income have declined for some professions.
The era of setting your heart on a particular job — doing a university course and stepping straight into a position — is over. If it existed, it’s gone. When thinking about further education, it is no longer with the view that you would be setting yourself up with a job for life.
People need to be very thoughtful about what they are good at, how they want to invest in learning to enable and be better at things they are good at, and how they want to invest in education that enables them to keep their options open.
Whatever major one chooses is not the ultimate fate. I only lasted slightly more than two years as a teacher. What young people should know is that a career shapes and shifts in unforeseeable ways.
Although universities provide a broad education and teach students critical thinking, students need a good, wide range of experiences to provoke them and shift their thinking. For young people today, it requires a longer time and proactive work to get into positions that use the qualification they achieved at university.
If the ideal job does not exist, the worker may need to create it. Entrepreneurial skills are likely to be increasingly important for small business founders and employees within large organisations.
So, forget passion, follow an interest. Passion is something you discover over time by finding an interest. Nurturing it, is a collection of small decisions that move you step by tiny step. Letting machines take over to some extent isn’t all bad. If the machines can do most of the jobs we are doing today, maybe one day, humans don’t have to work a whole lot if they don’t want to.
Hazlina Aziz is NST’s education editor, and is an ex-teacher who is always on the lookout for weirdly-spelled words