With the proliferation of artificial intelligence and big data, there is a growing demand for critical thinking, the ability to form value judgments, and solve complex ethical problems. At the same time, to distinguish fake news from real news, it is necessary to understand history, culture, and psychology, not only the subject of discussion, which can be a new virus or another cryptocurrency.
Digitalization is a steady and long-term trend. More and more digital technologies appear in many different areas of industry, communication, and education. The pandemic has accelerated this process: in two years, even people who were not eager to be active participants in this digital world have no choice.
Naturally, people fear: if I never learned anything digital I didn’t have in college, what will I do now? Am I out of the loop? No. Thanks to digital technology, it is possible to quickly retrain: learn a new business or master other facets of a profession you already have. And all this often without going to a particular university and without the time required for a second higher education. The tech industry created all possible help, even if you are studying at university. Online tutoring or writing services like us.essayassistant.org can help you get through the overload of the inflexible educational system. You can, for example, study online in the evenings. Thanks to online learning, you can get in touch with great professors and professionals in their field, get one-on-one instruction, and all the teacher’s attention.
Repetitive operations that are boring for humans to work with make it possible to create an algorithm by which a machine can be trained. But this does not mean that the person who used to do it will remain without a profession. He must retrain or occupy a niche within his work where creativity and intelligence are needed. For example, it takes a very long time for an accountant to reconcile documents. But it does not take five years of higher education to determine whether or not a particular item is written in a specific field – a robot can do the job. Meanwhile, a human can devote time to more complex processes requiring complete immersion.
For example, those who are now called SMM specialists will move from managing social networks and sales to managing meta universes – they will explain to us how to use this space and sell products and services already there. Just as they once moved from journalists – first newspaper, then radio and television – into the sphere of social networks, now they “evolve” into the sphere of meta worlds, remaining essentially in their profession, but giving up the routine. When they say that some narrow jobs will disappear, e.g., SMM people, bloggers, or tiktokers, they do not consider that these are all just minimal applications of a broad profession – and they can change or even disappear. There will be no interest in TikTok and no tiktokers, but these people will continue to communicate effectively on the Internet, solving business problems in other digital environments.
The pandemic is a test of flexibility
Source: asiasociety.org
Two years of the pandemic have made one thing clear – we have learned a lot more about the flexibility of humans and their ability to work in entirely unexpected environments. Many managers in this situation were lost and unable to establish a common language with the team at a distance. In contrast, others, on the contrary, quickly mastered alternative methods of management and encouragement.
This flexibility in 2024, when the pandemic has subsided, becomes another essential characteristic of a person in demand in the labor market. He is ready to use all available online tools, a hybrid work model – when some projects exist online, some in reality.
Your profession will disappear: what to do
What to do if your profession is at risk? Change it! And it doesn’t matter how old you are. We have examples of people over 50, with experience in accounting or auto repair shops, successfully changing fields. There is a beautiful example of a man who worked as a priest but had to leave his parish for health reasons. He mastered the profession of testers and is now working. Many jobs are not directly related to programming but are within IT. A tester is a great example. Humanitarians in this field make excellent progress because they act haphazardly: they test as they feel, and the program, created by the programmer’s logic, breaks – and a bug is found.
How to be relevant in the labor market
It’s tough to talk about any surges of interest in professions in this digital age because digital is everywhere. Digital skills can be applied in many different areas.
The science of data is increasingly evolving. The Yandex School of data analysis is becoming more and more attractive, as are the specialized departments at the top universities – Moscow State University, the Faculty of Physics and Technology, Baumanka, ITMO, Novosibirsk, and Tomsk universities. All over the country, from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad, there are the strongest universities with excellent departments that deal with data analysis. Because data science is the future. The role of such specialists not only in Internet business but in any business is growing every year.
What to study for modern schoolchildren
Source: dreamstime.com
What, then, are children being trained for? What profession will be in demand in 20-30 years? We cannot give an exact answer to this question. Not because we do not know what specialties will be called, but because it is difficult to predict what will be relevant in a few years. What will the machines in production be like? And will they even be if there is 3D printing now? How will the profession of an architect or engineer change in this regard?
These questions relate to absolutely every profession. So the answer to career guidance now is that we need to prepare ourselves for the unpredictable because we do not know the future. Our willingness to change and learn throughout life is the only way to be happy in our profession and demand.
Who will win the “race to the top”: the technical or the humanities
Now it is essential to put a plus sign between physicists and lyricists – and not any opposition, as it used to be. Nowadays, any humanist or artist needs “digital” education in this area; you need to know many things related to modern digital art, non-fungible token, and blockchain. And any good IT person must have the skills typical of an artist: imagination, ingenuity, and fantasy because it is getting harder and harder to create new things. And this means that you have to be able to “re-fantasize” not only other people but sometimes even to compete with algorithms. That’s why a lot of disciplines are now emerging at the intersection.
