Never stop learning
The advance of Information Technology has impacted everything, from manufacturing to medical, from business to education. It destroys many jobs, but also creates new jobs too. However, most people are worried about jobs that are threatened by technology, but not pay attention to the new opportunities and the newly created jobs.
I often told high school students: “The jobs that you will work by the time you graduate from college are probably do not even exist yet. So besides the knowledge that you learn from school, you must continually keep an open mind and pay attention to all the innovations that are happening now.” For example, five years ago, a position like “Big Data Analyst” did not even exist. With the proliferation of smartphones, streaming video, and the rapid growth of data everywhere, today “Big data analytics” is one of the “Hottest” jobs. As this is a new position, with many opportunities, they can expect very high salary across many industries. As the development of commercial drones has accelerated in the past two years, there is high demand in drone programming than ever before. As more businesses like Amazon are beginning to use drones to deliver products to customers, and many companies are following this trend, the future of people who could program drones is very bright.
But how many young people are spending the time to read about these innovation trends? If they have to learn about these trends, they often follow news about the latest electronic devices or newest video games. Most know about the iPhone 8 or Samsung Galaxie 9 , but not what they need to learn to make their career better. They want to be “Entrepreneur, ” but in fact, they only are consumers as they spend money, NOT making money.
To succeed in this technology-driven world, young students must continually read about all the technical changes that are happening and keep an open mind, be flexible, and always continue to learn new skills to be ready when changes occur. Although their education can help them to get a job, but to be successful, they need to develop the additional “soft skills” that will assist them to do well in different positions. “Soft-skills” are not something they can learn from books or schools but they must develop themselves by knowing their strengths and weaknesses. These are many identified soft-skills such as “Communication, Presentation, Collaboration, and Leadership, etc. but overall, they are the attitudes that allow people to get along with others, to make the right decisions, to solve problems, to develop respect and become leaders in their work.
When graduates asked me for advice, I always told them: “Develop the right attitudes in wherever you work, be humble and treat everybody with respect, take full responsibility for what you do, and never stop learning.”
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
