You might have noticed in the news, on social media, or in your talking with various people that the job market is changing.

You might have heard that a lot of jobs are going to disappear. Particularly routine manual and routine cognitive jobs.

However, it is not all doom and gloom, for one of skills that will experience increasing demand is the skill of dealing with people.

Think of sales managers, supervisors, project managers, team leaders and so on. Where the skills of directing, controlling and planning are central to success. These are the management and supervisory jobs. And with these jobs the critical component of success is the ability to manage and lead people.

One example of this is the replacing of checkout staff with self-serve machines at major grocery stores. While the routine checkout jobs are cut back, staff with people skills are needed all the more. For these self-service machine supervisors are having to deal with more complexity (they are watching over multiple machines) and having more complex interactions with people (ie, item lookups, ensuring all products are scanned, ensuring queues aren’t increasing, etc).

In this changing job market, whilst some “standard” jobs are being lost, ones with a different mix of skills will be in demand.

For the student in your life, it is advisable to maintain a clear-eyed consideration of the changing job opportunities.

For more of what I have to offer, visit Dellium Advisory, follow on Twitter, connect using LinkedIn, review my IT Strategy blog, subscribe to my YouTube channel, or buy my ‘Jobs. Future. You.’ workbook.