It’s grad season, a time when college students leave the beer bongs behind and head out into the cold, cruel world of full-time employment. Luckily for them, prospects are good.
For now, at least.
According to Michigan State’s annual “Recruiting Trends” survey, 83 percent of employers described the current market as “good” or “excellent” for job seekers from colleges and universities.
But what about years from now? The outlook may not be so rosy. Like some blue-collar workers, university-degree holders might have to brace themselves for a rude awakening.
We’ve all heard dire predictions of a future industrial revolution driven by robots and artificial intelligence that could lead to a collapsing job market for us humans. By one cynical estimate from a Carnegie Mellon professor, technology will eliminate 80 to 90 percent of US jobs in the next decade or so.
“I come down more on the side of [Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos when he says it’s impossible to overstate the impact AI will have on us in the next 20 years,” says Ed Hess, a University of Virginia business administration professor and author of the new book “Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age.” “I believe the risk is high enough that we need a plan B. We can’t wait to see what happens.”
Robots are undoubtedly getting more sophisticated and AI is growing more complex, allowing machines to perform work that had previously required a human touch. Certain jobs, such as insurance underwriters, bank tellers — even sports umpires — are likely to disappear in the coming decades, according to a widely cited report from Oxford academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne.
Others predict it won’t be all doom and gloom for our children and grandchildren.
“I think people overstate these changes [to the job market],” says Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit think tank. “I will guess it’s going to change more in the next 20 years than the last 20 years, but there was a report we did looking at occupational change by decade, and what you find is that earlier decades have much higher rates of change: the 1880s, 1950s, 1960s.”
The job market has always evolved as a result of technological and societal changes. It’s an eternal ebb and flow. Employment at newspapers, for example, was down 46.7 percent from 1998 to 2012, but jobs in tortilla manufacturing (driven by changing food tastes and a growing Hispanic population) were up 103.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Facebook is set to add some 3,000 workers to scour the site for hate speech and other offensive content — a gig that didn’t even exist a few years ago.
“We have evidence from history that these big shifts in our economy, whether they’re derived from industrialization or automation, don’t have to be a total economic collapse,” says Rakeen Mabud, a program director at Roosevelt Institute.
But changes are certainly coming, and our challenge is to figure out how to avoid becoming obsolete.
Education will be key. Those who will best be able to navigate the changing job market are people with technical training but also emotional intelligence and an ability to think creatively and learn new skills.
“The magic combination is some combo of engineering or science training with psychology and philosophy — and even some arts training,” Hess says. “No matter what I do, I’m going to have different jobs in my life. The number one job skill is iterative learning.”
Figuring out what people will want and need, based on lifestyle trends, helps point the way to constant employment. Here are seven sectors that are likely to offer a steady paycheck in the future.
MASSAGE THERAPY
Your hippie friend wasn’t wrong. The massage field is expected to experience 22 percent growth by 2024, and the chances of inventing a robot that can give you the perfect hot-stone rubdown are slim.
One of the drivers will be the country’s growing wealth. Personal income is expected to grow through at least 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and when people earn more money, they tend to spend it on indulgences. They won’t necessarily buy more food. Food is a necessity, like gas for cars; but they will eat out more often at restaurants (159,000 more cooks will be needed in the next decade).
Same goes for massages.
“If you’re making $30,000, you’re not going to see a massage therapist,” Atkinson says. “If you’re making $100,000, you might go once a month to get the kinks out of your back.”
LAW ENFORCEMENT
We are a very long way from a robot being able to don a trench coat, pop in a cigar and solve a crime. Police work is among the least likely to automate, according to Frey and Osborne.
Law enforcement is also limited by how much technology can goose productivity. Some fields, such as auto manufacturing, can produce far more as a result of new machines and innovations, but “it’s hard to raise the productivity of a policeman,” Atkinson says. Some tech advances are changing police work — a Virginia reporter is using an algorithm to crunch crime data in an attempt to identify serial killers, for example. But cracking cases is mostly still down to shoe-leather investigating.
Other personal-service fields, such as firefighters or physical therapists, are equally difficult to automate. Eyeing these tracks? You’re probably safe from the bread line.
MANAGEMENT
The ranks of “The Man” should swell some 7 percent in the next decade, and supervisors are in little danger of being made obsolete.
“You can’t really automate that job,” Atkinson says.
The purview of managers is fairly diverse, but it generally includes directing a team of employees or overseeing a particular function of a company. If you have organization skills, a general base of knowledge and are good with people, the field could be for you.
These managers of the future may not necessarily be the type-A, Wharton School stereotypes, though. The best leaders won’t be the smartest or most knowledgable, but ones who have the ability to think, listen, collaborate and learn, Hess says.
HEALTH CARE
This is about as sure as it comes when betting on the future. The number of Americans 65 and older is expected to more than double by 2060, leading to an explosion in industries related to them.
“When you think about changes in occupational structure, it’s about supply and demand, and we can’t lose sight of the demand side,” Atkinson says.
“Taking care of old people is where all the jobs are going to come from.”
Home health aids are projected to balloon 38 percent, registered nurses 16 percent and nursing assistants 18 percent by 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Japan is developing so-called “carebots” to perform various health-care functions, but human aides are unlikely to completely disappear anytime soon.
DATA ANALYSIS
As privacy continues to evaporate and companies have the ability to learn everything about us, from what goods we keep in our smart fridge to what our interests are on Facebook, someone needs to make sense of all that information.
“Data analysis is going to be huge for quite a while,” Hess says. “With the Internet of things and global connectivity, we’re going to be deluged with data and every organization is going to be able to analyze data. The best numbers I’ve looked at show that today in the United States, the job openings for data scientists are 10 times the number we’re producing.”
NUTRITION
Tossing the Twinkies and eating healthy has become more important for many Americans. Three out of four of us claim to eat well, according to an NPR survey, though 36 percent of the country is obese.
It’s no surprise that the number of dietitians and nutritionists is expected to grow “much faster than the average for all occupations,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The boom isn’t likely to go on forever, however. Hess says one day in the not-too-distant future, our bodies could be swimming with nanobots that analyze our health and nutrient and calorie levels.
CIVIL ENGINEERING
The Trump administration marked the first full week of June as “Infrastructure Week.” And while much of the time got overshadowed by ill-advised tweets and congressional testimony, the idea that this country’s aging roads, airports, levees and other critical systems will need repairing is a solid one.
The civil-engineering field will add some 23,600 new bodies by 2024 alone, making it a good bet for the future. The city’s potholes alone should keep a legion busy for decades.