Automation will constantly transform or eliminate jobs and careers. Tasks within the jobs and skills needed to perform jobs will look very different in five years.
Many students and school leavers will end up working in completely new job types that have yet to exist while they are school. Skills learned today will be redundant tomorrow.
As lower-level jobs and tasks are constantly being automated or transformed with advanced technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence, new job titles, work processes, and industries will be innovated and created across nearly every economic sector. The negative impact on workers will be huge as this could mean massive unemployment for many workers.
With every danger, there will be opportunities. This will force people to constantly acquire above-average education, training, and experience just to keep up.
Many people will have to shift to higher-skilled occupations away from the manual or physical work as they are replaced by robots.
To do this shift and transformation well, students will have to increase their capability and capacity to perform well even while at school, college or university. They must aspire to gain relevant employable skills and experience by doing voluntary work, internships, or even taking a gap year straight after school.
This could also apply to all workers who need to constantly transform themselves with future-ready skills, experience, and knowledge.
Apart from having work-related and technological skills that could be transferred to other jobs, there will also be growing emphasis on soft skills (e.g., social and emotional skills), and enterprise or higher cognitive skills (i.e., problem-solving, communication, teamwork, creativity, etc) as interaction with technology and machines become more prevalent.
Humans will have to specialise in areas where robots and machines don’t have a competitive edge over humans. For example, understanding human emotions or creating and sustaining meaningful social and human interactions.
College or university graduates who can’t secure their first job because they do not have the relevant vocational and practical work skills and experience in their occupation of choice upon graduating are forced to take on short-term jobs that are unrelated to their field of study.
Many lacked the necessary interview and job application skills to be able to attain full-time work or jobs of their choice.
Unfortunately, it is five times more likely that young job seekers will remain unemployed after five years of graduation when compared to those who were not underemployed in their first job.
Some will eventually not use what they have learned at colleges and universities. Most likely, they will struggle financially to pay off their student loans. They don’t earn enough money to survive and save enough money for a house and car.
The social impact of under-employed over-qualified graduates will be increasing if nothing drastic is done to minimise and manage these challenges.
For over-qualified graduates, they can remain under-employed for a very long time. Under-employment of over-qualified graduates will be problematic for many countries especially when job vacancies are fast diminishing with an increasing number of young people coming into the job market.
On a positive note, degree holders in most STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are less likely to be under-employed. If they can find jobs, they will earn more money than non-college graduates.
Jobs specialisation will be another key for the future of work. Generalist will find it harder to secure a job in the future.
What is needed is a better course and career guidance for students and school leavers. This will minimise any misalignment between their job aspirations and educational intention. Over- or under-qualification of graduates must be proactively managed so that students are not overburdened with unnecessary study debts due to the increasing cost of education and living.
It is not surprising that many young people will increasingly struggle with modern-day living. They will increasingly experience mental health conditions and stresses and will require resources to mitigate.
To speed up the transition into full-time employment, in addition to having a positive mindset, school leavers should actively consider future-proofed employment types like being carers (i.e., nursing, social workers), technologist (i.e., software engineers, web administrator, ICT business analysts), or informers (i.e., teachers, policy analysts, event organisers).
The ‘know-who’ factor is also relevant in finding and securing jobs as many job vacancies are not advertised but filled via personal contacts and through networking. This is where parents and adults can play an active role in assisting young people to get their foothold into the job market.
The shift to occupations requiring high skills (i.e., professionals) and high touch (i.e., community and personal services) will only become more intense in coming years as more and more jobs and tasks are transformed or replaced by technology and automation. These are the skills that graduates (and job seekers) must constantly acquire to make them job-ready and future-ready.
It is more instructive to examine which occupations rely on skill sets that machines are unable to replicate because it is these occupations that will be most resilient and future-proof in terms of their requirement for uniquely human labour.