With the rise of artificial intelligence, what career should my child choose?
Your child should choose jobs or careers that meet one or more of the following criteria: unstructured, dynamic, creative, unpredictable, and highly regulated.
As we rely on machines and automation to replace and augment our work, workers are expected to do a more complex unstructured task and higher-level skilled work or perform more interactions with people.
Careers that have these qualities will be safe from automation.
The good news is that the road to automation requires robots to collaborate with humans rather than simply replacing them altogether. Majority of jobs will still require human intervention to some degree.
The risk of job automation is highest in predictable, manual, and repetitive work environments and in industries with lower regulations.
More and more, we are using machines to take over manual, repetitive or dangerous tasks from humans.
The reality is that as automation transforms manual jobs into intellectual jobs, jobs and careers that require greater human thinking, analysis, and creativity will become more in demand and secure.
Therefore, students in primary and secondary schools and in universities must now be trained to handle higher-level intellectual, analytical, and creative thinking. Such mental and intellectual capabilities will not come overnight.
Future of work will also require more human to human interaction. People who cannot connect and interact effectively with individuals and teams will be left out.
There are two limitations that we must know.
Today’s educations systems are outdated. They are not producing future-ready workers in sufficient numbers to meet the increasing demand by employers.
Secondly, due to various personality types, a large number of people will not be able to handle such higher-level mental and human interaction expectations. It is just their nature.
It’s like some people will go to universities and some will go to technical colleges
Therefore, while we can encourage our children to take up careers or jobs that have a lower likelihood of being automated, they may not be able to perform those jobs because of their education and personalities.
Parents, you have to manage your expectations of your child based on their personality, capability and capacity.