Today’s Students Will Face A Radically Different Career Market

BY BEATRICE DUPUY

Pondering the future often leads to many questions such as “Will I be successful? Will I be famous?” But before success and fame can be achieved, a career path is typically chosen. For high school students searching for potential majors, there are many options in the future. One trend changing the future job market is technology. Technology is being used to downsize jobs and eliminate jobs with no need for specialized skills. Technology is causing the downfall of yesterday’s jobs, while providing jobs for tomorrow.

As technology advances, it is expected to overtake jobs like travel agents, bank tellers, telephone operators, prison guards, and truckers. For instance, prison guards will be unnecessary when microscopic implants will be placed inside inmates to keep them from committing criminal acts.  Information technology will be a one of the top jobs as there will be a need for more network security.

“It’s a huge area of growth because every time you buy something from a store online, you’re going into a database,” Laurence Shatkin, author of 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves Now for a Solid Future said in a yahoo education article. “Computer networks and network database administration require [workers with] high levels of skill.”

Some future careers Time magazine expects to be in demand: data miners and turing testers. Data miners will sift through information on the Internet and find research that will provide insight into patterns for marketers and epidemiologists (investigate disease patterns). Turing Testers will act as human simulators used as Internet customer service representatives “who can summarize your e-mails and even write back.” Along with these Internet jobs, careers in the electronics industry will multiply. No longer will there be a need for a handyman to do manual repairs, when electronic devices will have remote diagnostics to fix their own problems.

While some of these careers may seem far out into the future, not too long ago, it was hard for baby boomers to believe in both the Internet and cellphones. Other career options will come from the future of medical science. Medical careers like tissue engineers and gene programmers are already in the works. In the future, tissue engineers will grow organs out of Petri dishes while gene programmers will use genome maps to individualize prescriptions to further prevent diseases. Time magazine predicts that future farmers called pharmers will also be using genetics to produce livestock that will contain certain proteins.

“Medicine technology and biomedical engineering will be the next big thing,” senior Khaled Hassen.

More options for the future consist of working with the constantly changing environment. With natural disasters in the media, jobs such as meteorologists are speculated to be in higher demand in the future. Green jobs will also be vital in the future, for instance, wind farmers will create energy from the wind. According to Forbes, the green job market could become the “the nation’s fastest-growing job segment, accounting for roughly 10% of new jobs over the next 20 years.”

“Green jobs like wind farming engineering are going to be the next big thing,” senior Chris Shultze said.

Colleges are already beginning to accommodate the move of job market into green jobs by offering majors for the future. Arizona State University offers a degree in sustainability which deals with environmental care, economics, ethics, and earth-systems management. By looking even farther into the future there will be jobs like weather modification police. These police will have to monitor the silver iodine levels in the air to ensure that silver iodine is not being used to stimulate rain in clouds.

“None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be, or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution,” President Barack Obama said in his state of the union address. “What we can do — what America does better than anyone — is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It’s how we make a living.”

These jobs may seem unlikely now, but eventually these jobs will be the hot jobs of the future. And if today’s high school students choose these new careers, they’re future selves might just come back and thank them.