Preparation for the future
A student wrote to me: “After reading your blog about robots and automation take people's jobs. I am worried about my future. I talked about this to my friends, and they are worried too. What advice can you give to a high school student like me to find a good job in the future? What can a country do to avoid this? Please advise.”
Answer: My advice is to prepare for whatever may come and do not worry about something that you cannot control. Since many future jobs will be in science, technology, engineering, and math areas (STEM), you should select a field within the STEM areas to prepare for Future jobs. Beside technical areas, you need to develop the “soft skills” such as teamwork, communication, presentation, leadership, etc. In this globalized market, you also need to know at least one foreign language such as English, regardless what your career may be. Having both technical and soft skills is the best thing you can do to get a good job.
If you look back at history, whenever technology progress happened, it always caused confusions, but society always moved forward. Today there are many problems that can only be solved by advancing in technology, so the best way for students is to develop technology skills that allow you to solve these problems in the future. As students, you should not be afraid of technology but look at it as opportunities, not threats. When technology changes, many jobs will have to change and by knowing which skills are needed and focus on learning these skills; you will do well. For example, today there is a shortage of people with skills in Data science, cloud computing, Internet of Things, Mobile apps development, and Software engineering, etc. My question are: “How many students know about this?” and “Are they preparing for such needs?
As a high school student, you should prepare NOW so when going to college; you are ready. Try to take as many math and science courses as you can. Taking these courses now will help you to make progress on advanced courses when you go to college. In high school, besides the common algebra and geometry, you should also take calculus, trigonometry, and physics because these are the foundation for many STEM courses in college. If your school have computer classes, you should take programming courses such as Java or C++ because today coding is a necessary skill that everyone must have.
By taking additional science, technology, engineering, and math courses, you can explore more opportunities and know how these fields have an impact on the world. If you know someone who works as an engineer, mathematician, scientist, or software developer, you may want to ask them for additional guidance about the career that you want to consider. Depending on which field interests you the most, you can contact people who are working in the field to find out more about what they do and see if it might be the right field for you.
The problem we have today is not many students understand the role that technologies play in creating new opportunities and jobs and be able to prepare for it. Many continue to follow the “old notion” of going to college, select anything that suits them, get a degree then finding a job later instead of planning their career earlier and explore which is the best opportunity for them.
I think it is the time that we need a serious public discussion about the impact of technologies on the workforce in the next ten years, and the opportunities that are opening up so high school and college students can prepare for them. We need to reduce the gap between the “highly educated” and the “Lesser educated,” the “Employed” and the “Unemployed,” those are benefiting from technology and those who are left behind. We have to look at the impact of globalization, the advance of technology and what they are going to mean to our people, our society, and our country, not today but five or ten years from now. We need to bring these concerns to the public discussions because they have to be a priority issue for the governments and society. Soon, many jobs will disappear as people will not have the same jobs that we have today. But many new jobs will be created, and people will need the right training and the right education to seize these opportunities.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
