Advice to a computer Science student part 3
A computer Science student asked: “I will graduate in 2017 and currently looking for a job. What may happen in the next few years that could impact my job? What could I do to make sure I will have a successful career? Please advise.”
Answer: As a student in the technology field, you should know that technology changes very fast and the only way to keep a job and building a successful career is to continue learning new things and keep your skills up to date. Today everything is impacted by technology, and there will be significant changes in every country, every society in the next few years. Soon many rules, policies, theories, and assumptions that people are depending on will be obsoleted because of this rapid change.
The most devastating thing to a country is many jobs will be eliminated as automation and robots are being used to do the work. We saw this happened in many western countries, but now it is spreading to the rest of the world. In the next few years, millions of people will lose their livelihoods, and there will be significant disruptions in many societies. Soon you will see self-driving cars disrupt the transportation industry; automation changes office works; robots do more work in factories, but that is only the beginning. With the advancement of big data analytics, many jobs relating collecting data, analyzing, calculating, and predicting will also disappear and these are most jobs in government and financial sectors. Automated medical equipment will replace general medical doctors in diagnostic, radiology, and pathology etc.
How do you avoid being replaced by a machine or a piece of software? The answer is to study science and technology. Instead of having robots take away your job, you work on jobs that creates or build robots. Since you are a computer science student, my advice is you should read more to develop lifelong learning skills to stay current with the changes in science and technology. To keep up with technology changes, online learning such as MOOCs is probably the best, and it does not cost anything. Today you can learn MOOC courses from anywhere, anytime.
The problems in MOOCs is not many people are willing to complete the course or working on the homework to develop the skills. Many professors who are teaching MOOCs told me that only one out of a hundred, complete the course. Last month, I worked with a friend who is teaching MOOCs to analyze the data. We found that many Asian students enrolled in MOOCs only like to listen to the lectures, but few would do homework or finish assignments. I understand that many Asian students are used to listen to lectures because that is the traditional teaching approach. But without working on quizzes or homework, they will not develop the skills as their knowledge is only superficial but not deep enough. They may know something about the technology but cannot apply it to solve problems.
If you want to keep your skills up to date, you must study seriously, not doing anything halfway, it is your time, your effort so does not waste it. Your future is in your hand, and as long as you put in the efforts, you will do well.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
