How to Prepare for Jobs that Don't Exist Yet
Over the last few centuries, we’ve gotten pretty good at delaying death. According to one estimate, since 1840, we’ve been adding on three months of life expectancy every single year.
Some futurists and experts on aging and longevity have suggested that the first people to live to be 150 years old had already been born. I used to think that idea alone was mind-blowing, but apparently, I haven’t been thinking boldly enough about this. In a recent interview with Scientific American, João Pedro de Magalhães, a professor of molecular biogerontology in England, is thinking that it could be possible for us to add thousands of years to a human lifespan:
I actually did some calculations years ago and found that if we could cure human aging, average human life span would be more than 1,000 years. Maximum life span, barring accidents and violent death, could be as long as 20,000 years.
Granted, de Magalhães doesn’t see this happening anytime soon, so don’t worry, we’ll get to die! But we’re going to keep working longer than we ever anticipated.
Today, workers who are 55 and older are staying in the workforce at historically high rates, well into their late 60s and even 70s. And many of them average 12 job changes by the time they retire.
So for the rest of us, 20 or 30 jobs over a lifetime might become the new normal, especially as technological advancements continue to give rise to entirely new kinds of jobs and careers—ones we can’t even begin to name.
The future is one of long-life learning, the subject of my book. With this new time horizon, it’s likely that ongoing skill development will become a way of life as we strive to keep up with an ever changing world of work.
So, whether you’re a jobseeker, a learning provider, or an employer, here are three things we can start doing today to prepare for jobs that don’t exist yet.
Let’s start with Jobseekers:
Every day, as workers, you’re encountering new digital challenges, new ethical dilemmas, new problems to solve.
You’re likely already noticing that there are areas where you’re feeling like you need to get smart fast on a specific subject. It’s critical to pay attention to these flags. Maybe it’s data visualization, or cloud computing, or search engine optimization that keeps coming up as something increasingly relevant to your work. These are your skill gaps tugging for your attention—asking to be filled with new knowledge.
At work, those moments of discomfort when you’re nodding along to something you don’t fully understand… that's a signal to act, do something, and get smart quickly in that new development. There are thousands of open educational resources that can orient you on how to begin that upskilling process.
But it’s also important to note that it’s not always going to be some technical or technological skill you’ll need to stay competitive. Your next step may involve something about your broader human skills or leadership skills that needs honing.
Skills building for the future will entail both a breadth of knowledge and some depth of technical or vertical expertise—both human + technical skills. We may need more intellectual dexterity or technical expertise depending on where we are in our careers—in other words, at times, real emotional intelligence and at other times, more of a grasp of artificial intelligence.
Where are the precise, right-sized learning experiences to acquire that one competency or four or 11 new ones that we need to advance? Long-life learning will have to be targeted, brief, and affordable—something we can fit into our busy lives without taking us away from paid work.
Educators have some work to do here to be viewed as a source of this human + tech skills building for working learners. They have to offer flexible, on-demand precision learning that sends a powerful signal to future employers.
We each come with different talents and specific upskilling needs. An office administrator in New York City trying to move into financial analysis might just need skills like business process improvement, risk analysis and Scrum. Or a machinist in Wichita, Kansas might be missing just a few skills in lean manufacturing and continuous quality improvement. A systems network analyst might have to strengthen her interpersonal skills or EQ and empathy. A one-hour online course, in this case, isn’t going to cut it. It’s going to take practice and a different approach.
A stunning 95 percent of workers report that they understand the value of lifelong learning, but that doesn’t mean they’ll want every element of a bundled, comprehensive degree program. One-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter degree programs designed for 18- to 24-year-old students cannot and will not suffice for lifelong learners and prospective job seekers.
The millions who failed to make it all the way through and out of college the first time around aren’t really dying to go back to school. Others who already have a degree or even advanced degrees aren’t necessarily going to want another degree.
Engineering a lifelong learning infrastructure isn’t just about repackaging our university system for working learners into smaller, short-form credentials. It involves a serious redesign of our processes, pathways, resources, and services to empower learners to understand where they are today, in terms of their skills, capabilities, and hidden credentials, relative to where they want to go.
Time is one of our most precious resources, so Companies must play a significant role here by reimagining on-the-job training.
Over the last four decades in the US, as an example, employers have seriously disinvested from actively training their workers. In one survey, 44 percent of employers shared that they offered zero reskilling opportunities for employees. Zero. And when they do offer training, it’s compliance training—not about building skills for the future.
The tacit expectation to date has been that employees will magically find extra time to upskill themselves on top of the myriad other responsibilities they are juggling. But we can’t continue to lay the burden of reskilling on the individual. Earning and learning have to be simultaneous and integrated—one and the same.
It’s time for companies to set aside specific time in the workday for employees to build and practice new skills. It could be an hour a day or an hour per week, but somehow, cultivating talent must happen on the job. Education must feel seamless—not something to add on top of employees’ existing responsibilities and constraints.
Ultimately, preparing for jobs we can’t even name yet means understanding the demand for
Human + technical skills
Acquiring them through precision education
Integrating hands-on opportunities to learn that are embedded in the flow of the work day or week
This is how we begin to harness the power of education over and over again throughout a longer, more unpredictable future of work.
