Illustration by Kevin Dulle, from worldxo

1 What are the Top Jobs to look out for?

Notes from 10s of 100s of scholarly articles in Futures Research.

“Change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past and present are certain to miss the future” -John F. Kennedy[i]

With the ever-evolving computing technology, and computing in education, our world may seem like it’s heading towards a mostly digital future. Most articles we find when looking for ‘What should my child study to survive or have a good job’ all point towards a world in which they need to prepare, or execute a program, to automate an existing solution.

After looking at the World Economic Forum [ii]article – as well as all the articles shared on countless scholarly platforms – and applying loosely the FSSF (Futures Signals Sense-Making Framework)[iii] we were able to try and whittle down a list of top jobs of the future by focusing on what skillsets would remain critical in any type of future, even if assuming the world did get itself into a nuclear war.

We will start with the list of 10 jobs, and then afterwards explain the reasoning why those were shortlisted. The method used to list is taking the skillsets required according to the WEF, then reading about those skillsets from a practical point of view, e.g., where are those skillsets used, and then through online research, we looked at a plethora of jobs in several relevant industries, to understand where those jobs currently exist. We used our own sense-making in terms of deciding if this job is something that will a: continue as is, b: evolve to something else, c: become obsolete, and d: become divided or branch off. Please note the list is in no order of importance.

2 Our Choices of Top Jobs (in no order) based on meta data and anecdotal surveys:

Entertainment and Content Creation Management
Game Designers
Engineers
Business Development and Entrepreneurship
Food Science and Agriculture
Information Security Analysts and Data Security Programmers
Biotechnology with focus on life-prolonging sciences (for space travel)
Space Travel
Hard Skills jobs (Sewing, carpentry, building, cooking etc)
Social Workers

3 Why This list?

The underlying factor to begin with is that we found a common flaw in all the articles we read. Recall The first time we read about Data Science (the term that evolved from what used to be business analytics, and prior to that econometrics and so on) was in 2014. There was a strong reporting and drive on acceleration of jobs going into Data Science, Machine Learning and AI. This author even studied basic Data Science, and is by no means an expert, but the one fundamental truth that comes out of these jobs and skills is that they are created to automate most tasks. Tasks like accounting and book-keeping, taking meta-data dumps from the internet to understand consumer purchasing behavior. They’ve evolved into customer service chat bots. They automate data entry.

But there is a much more useful evolution of this industry of automation, which is in fact to automate Machine Learning, and eventually automating AI! So, what happens after that? All those kids who went to study Data Science are now already being replaced by, well, a data analytics AI that was created by a Data Scientist who invented an amazing Machine Learning model. There is no telling when this will happen, but it will happen. Be it 2025 or 2050. So, what is the WEF’s response to their big bold “97Million jobs in Data Analysis and Scientists, and process creation etc”? There is none; it was probably an AI that wrote the article. Hence, our focus is 2 to 3 generations from now. I.e., your grand kids’ futures.

As a disclaimer, nobody can predict what will be the jobs of the future with any accuracy – there are millions of jobs and job iterations – so the Jobs we have selected as top 10 assume that what if 50% of all work is automated? So, our “Whys” for these choices:

Entertainment, Art and Content Creation: Because as much as we will head to automate music and content online, the human spirit will not be captured in digital form for many decades, and maybe centuries. A bot will not create Start Trek and make a ‘Data’-like character. Same with YouTube and TikTok etc.
Metaverse or Game Designers: Because, allegedly and according to most articles, the Metaverse is coming (regardless if we think it\’s over-rated, with few applications other than gaming, social media momentum is driving it) and just like arts and content creation, you’ll need creativity. Something that is not yet available in AI or machine learning at a pro human level. There will clearly be various jobs within the metaverse, and we chose gaming as a category to encompass everything from design, hardware building, planning, research etc.
Engineers: have you heard about Boyan Slat? He is attempting to clean the sea from plastic waste and recycling that waste. Engineering will be jobs that will never fade away. The computers might take away or simplify calculations and solution design, but engineers will always be the ones that need to find the problem to solve and design and execute the solution. Data Scientists or digital experts might be able to explain and predict how much garbage is going into the sea, but the engineers will find a scalable solution to clean the sea, like Boyan.
Business Development and Entrepreneurship: this will forever be required in any industry to advance or create that industry.
Food Science and Agriculture: We’re running out of farmable soil with the increase in monocropping solutions. Technology and research in this field (pardon the pun) need to keep evolving to suit the needs of both ideological and science-based food solutions. Humans need food, and thus the technology to satisfy both will become quite critical in the very near future. Not to mention our climate also has an impact and thus this is more urgent now.
Information Security Analysts and Security Programmers: To stop unscrupulous AI from hacking our bank accounts and identities when the metaverse takes over.
Biotechnology with life-prolonging Sciences: We will need to live longer if we plan on traveling further into space.
Space Travel: Tech for space is trending in the private sector. This will explode soon when logistics goes into the stratosphere. There is even a recruiting company called EVONA[iv] that was created to form the first ever space-centric jobs search. Joke or real?
Hard Skills Jobs: This will be quite counter-intuitive considering most article did not even mention at all any hard skills jobs except for ‘working labour’. The truth is many people will lose their soft skill jobs. This could lead to less money to buy ready-made things. Which would further lead people to want to learn how to make things like a chair to sit on, or a dress. Tuomo Kuosa in his article[v] mostly focused ‘slowbilisation’ impact on supply chains. But we believe we need to take it further to individuals and not just micro communities and see how this pandemic pointed out that we need to be self-reliant. We are not saying it will take over as a top job, but we strongly believe hard skills will come back later when upskilling is no longer a viable option for the ageing population.
Health and Social Workers: With more and more people potentially losing work or having to be more in the digital world – and thus less human-to-human interaction – we think this will create a new wave of social workers who will either be there to support various situations from destitute people to those having mental illness such as anxiety and depression, to even policing due to potential raise in petty crimes.

4 Analysis of Data

We aim to select 5 out of the 10 previous jobs that will be more popular in the future. Starting with Metaverse or Game Designers, or as mentioned anything to do with metaverse design. We need to be cautious not to use the word metaverse too much because they are quite inter-connected to gaming design, and thus putting them in the same category since they share almost all the same type of skill requirements. As an example, here we can find projected Metaverse titles[vi]: 3D Game Designers. “As the creative force behind the development of a video game, game designers in the metaverse will be responsible for designing, prototyping and building an all-immersive, 3D gaming experience that engages players like never before.” This is also the current trend in game design employment. There is big amount of data in this article https://techjury.net/blog/video-games-industry-statistics/#gref that indicates just how big the gaming industry has gotten but they have not taken into account the metaverse yet. So, Gaming and Metaverse-related jobs in my opinion will continue to grow at a steady pace.

$\"man$ Entertainment, Art and Content creation is our next big bet because creativity will not be over-taken by AI. Yes, there are companies like https://www.aiva.ai/ that can create ‘Emotional Soundtrack Music’, but they will never capture true emotion since we all know art and music, and theatre are subjective and will forever deal with human emotional intelligence. An AI cannot tell if or when a person might find their taste for music change over time. E.g., if an AI analysed someone who grew up with thousands of hours listening to Heavy Metal, the machine learning algorithm will train itself to always suggest or create heavy music. But what if this person happened to hear a rap song while playing a game or at a friend\’s house and really enjoyed it? How can an AI then create a song based on such a gap in genre? What if they enjoyed classical music as they got older? Can it bridge that gap or suggest Bach in place of Slipknot? Sure, over the span of this person’s life the AI might compose new songs based on the frequency of listens to a style, but it can never predict what feelings that person will have when they listen to something for the first time. It can only predict based on learned and tested behaviour. Hence, this industry (human artistic creations) will also remain quite stable and in fact tools that support it will evolve and grow. Here is a good website that shares some insight https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-industry-trends. There will be a continuing explosion of individual creativity. A perfect summation is: “It’s a transition from mass-consumption to mass-creation. These kids who grew up in Minecraft are coming through, they entertain themselves by being creative. […] A.I. is just going to give them new creative tools and let them create whatever they can imagine\”. Stephen Phillips, CEO of A.I. lab Mawson

The next major job growth will be in the Health and Social Work industry.

$\"\"$

The above graphic was taken from David Petersen’s publication on TDS[vii] and it specifically focuses on the US. Supporting this data is the report from the Bureau of Labour Statistics, “Healthcare occupations are projected to add more jobs than any of the other occupational groups. This projected growth is mainly due to an aging population, leading to greater demand for healthcare services.” This data was last updated on Sep 2021, but we can be confident it hasn’t changed that much. In addition to an aging population, we postulate that when the Metaverse becomes more popular and readily available to all, mental and physical health complications will be on the rise and so this industry will not slow down. One just must look at the mental health statistics in conjunction with the rise in online and social media popularity[viii]. “Adolescents who spend more than 3 hours per day using social media may be at heightened risk for mental health problems, particularly internalizing problems”. The pandemic and the resulting ill-informed reaction of isolating and locking down large parts of several countries was a social experiment in itself with millions of children and adults suffering from severe social anxiety and depression all covered in various Lancet and Psychology papers world wide after reintroduction to regular society living.

$\"\"$ Next, Information Security Analysts and Security Programmers. There will be a strong need to ensure the user’s cryptocurrency wallet (if these still exist), their physical likeness, their online profile and presence is not hacked or stolen. In additional to game design, this field will probably be one of the most technical and difficult to master. It will not have a high number of employees simply because it will be career that continues to evolve, but it will certainly be one of the more financially lucrative and will grow in proportionality to Metaverse worlds.

$\"man$ Finally, Hard Skills Jobs will not drop and potentially be on the rise. As more and more young people flow towards soft-skill jobs, while at the same time we are looking at ways to be more sustainable and reduce our impact on the planet, then it’s only natural that part of sustainability will require the de-construct, re-cycle, and re-use model to minimize mining our resources, or cutting down trees. Hard Labour demand has dropped over the past 10 years, NOT just because of covid, as some publications insist[ix], but COVID-19 certainly did help create a short-term glut in hard skill labour.

Demand will rise again, as well as continue to rise albeit slowly. Requirements for Carpentry and Woodwork skills, Fitting and Plumbing, and Steel workers will come back in order to support the more sustainable approach to building from de-constructed homes or build site material. Our prediction assumes that the recycled and home deconstructing needs will grow due to the UN’s and COP26 CO2 emission reduction mission.

5 Conclusions

Based on the above, We conclude that based on all the literature that is presented in various formats online, the top 5 jobs for the future will be, in no specific order.

Entertainment, Art and Content Creation
Metaverse/Game Designing
Health and Social Work
Information Security Analysts and Security Programmer
Hard Skills Jobs – Wood/Steel work, and plumbing

And, we think they are wrong and explain our real choice in Part 2.

[i] https://www.rossross.com/blog/change-is-the-law-of-life-jfk

[ii] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/top-10-work-skills-of-tomorrow-how-long-it-takes-to-learn-them/

[iii] journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/futures

[iv] https://www.evona.com/

[v] https://hhmoodle.haaga-helia.fi/pluginfile.php/2538955/mod_resource/content/2/Futures%20signals%20sense-making%20framework.pdf

[vi] https://www.itcareerfinder.com/brain-food/blog/entry/great-jobs-in-the-metaverse.html

[vii] https://towardsdatascience.com/employment-growth-trends-by-industry-and-city-a-data-study-5002bf20692

[viii] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2749480

[ix] https://www2.deloitte.com/xe/en/insights/economy/global-labor-shortage.html

Future of Work (part 1): What we mostly see online