What You Need to Know About Choosing a Future-Proof Career

What You Need to Know About Choosing a Future-Proof Career

Given the rapid advancement of automation technology, you might be wondering how to choose a future-proof career. Expert opinion diverges on whether future proofing is even possible. There are experts who believe there will come a time when robots will do all work, leading to mass unemployment.

Other experts believe automation technology will spawn a new era of human productivity and prosperity. They believe that each job technology takes away will lead to better, more meaningful, more engaging jobs for human workers to transition into.

We have seen numerous past examples of this. When the printing press was popularized, countless scribes had to either adjust to the new technology or find new jobs; but the marvelous new invention gave rise to a whole new, exciting industry that eventually employed legions of journalists, columnists, copywriters, editors and salespeople. This technology opened up exponentially more opportunities than it eliminated. Automation technology might also result in new industries and a proliferation of job opportunities we can’t even imagine yet.

You sure don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars educating yourself to become a scribe when it’s clear that the new economy has no job openings for scribes. So before you take action to pursue any particular career path, it’s important to research whether employment in that vocation is trending up or down.

If you’re planning to work in the USA, take a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website to research the career you’re considering. The BLS is a subset of the US Department of Labor. Their economists track information about the workforce in the United States. They also make forecasts about how many job openings are expected in the future for each major vocation and for many minor vocations as well.

Let’s look at an example. If you’re a civil engineer, and you’re wondering if it would be a smart move to make a career change into management, you’ll want to check out their reports on engineering and management careers. They’ve forecasted that demand for civil engineers will grow at an accelerated pace of 11 percent, which is far above the growth rate they’re predicting for the rest of the US economy. If they’re correct, about 32,200 new civil engineering jobs will be added to the US economy by the year 2026.

They also have a job outlook forecast for architectural and engineering managers. The predicted rate of growth for this type of management career is 6 percent. More interestingly, their report on the current job outlook gives details about which facets of engineering and architecture they expect to see increasing, in contrast to the sectors that they expect to see a decline. BLS analysts are forecasting that the industry that employs significant numbers of civil engineers — the engineering services industry — will expand by 13 percent by 2026. So this data leads us to the conclusion that a career change from civil engineer to engineering manager in the engineering services industry could prove to be an excellent move.

However, you also have to consider how much of an investment in training would be necessary for making such a transition. To become an engineering manager, you might need to earn a Master’s in Engineering Management (MEM) degree, or a similar graduate degree to successfully compete for these desirable jobs. So before you make that kind of investment, you’d have to be pretty committed to the career change you’re considering.

In Australia, you can get similar insights from the Job Outlook website. This report might also be helpful to Aussies who are concerned with future proofing their careers. In the UK, check out a government report on their projections for the best jobs in 2030 and beyond.

You can get additional insights by observing trends in the news media. For example, experts in both the mainstream and alternative medias have been reporting that the infrastructure in the USA needs attention. This is actually one of President Trump’s important agenda items to address. In the mass media, they’re throwing around BIG numbers like $1.5 trillion in federal funds that will be devoted to infrastructure — although, so far, those big numbers have failed to materialize. Regardless, if Trump plans to allocate government funding for infrastructure, it’s a good bet that there will be opportunities for both engineers and engineering managers in the future. According to CNBC, there’s an urgent need for major civil engineering projects in at least 10 different US states that currently have failing infrastructure.

One more important question to ask when you’re considering whether a particular job is future proof: Does this job require empathy or emotional sensitivity to perform? If the answer is yes, there is a good chance that the job is reasonably future proof. Robots cannot yet excel at tasks that require a complex understanding of the human psyche. Management jobs do tend to fall into this realm — so a job as an engineering manager actually does look like it has fantastic potential to be future proof.

Whichever career you decide to pursue, be sure to make it one that interests you. You will need to continually learn, improve and become increasingly more valuable to your employer if you want to remain employable in the future.