Category Archives: Career

Thinking Skills Are In

Career, Futures, Leadership

Well. In observing what is happening in the world of work you may have noticed that the job market is changing.

Blog - Thinking Skills
All the talk, and a lot of articles and research are pointing to the declining demand for people to fill routine manual and routine cognitive jobs.

Remember, though, it has always been this way. The job market is forever changing. For example, there wasn’t as much demand for social media marketing experts and big data scientists in the 1970’s as there is today!

And that brings me to my point – one of the skills that will experience increasing demand is the ability to think. The ability to think in systems, to think critically, to think creatively and laterally. That ability to use our cognitive capacity in non-routine ways.

Consider our unique human abilities when it comes to using our brain: we can dream up new products, we can gain unique insights into health-related areas, we can discover new ways of building things and we can create poetry, music and art. And on it goes.

The ability to think is a skill that is worth developing and a critical component of creating a “future-proof” career.

 

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.

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Routine manual jobs are on the way out.

Career, Futures, Futurist, Strategic Foresight

You might have picked up on the news that the nature of the job market is changing.

Blogpost - Factory

Now, while it is true that the economy has always changed over time (for example, do you remember that Australia used to ride on the “sheep’s back”?) it seems that the rate of change is increasing.

And you can put that down to the impact of computers.

The impact of computers on jobs over the coming years was highlighted by Frey and Osborne in their 2013 “Future of Employment” study and CEDA, in their 2015 “Australia’s future workforce” report, further developed this understanding. However, the real discovery was by an MIT Economics Professor (David Autor). Through an investigation into the amount of human labour used by USA companies for jobs dominated by manual tasks, he found that demand for this type of labour had declined by about 10% over the 50 years from 1960.

Now, while companies were still producing things that required manual tasks, they require fewer men and women to do that manual work.

The impact is that some entry level jobs are lost and that jobs for the lower skilled are harder to find. It means that career choices must be made with more consideration.

So, for the student in your life, a clear-eyed consideration of the changing job opportunities must be paramount.

 

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.’ book.